| Are retailers wasting money with their big budget Christmas TV campaigns? | | 12 November 2013, 12:45PM |  When your local supermarket, department store or specialist retailer breaks a brand new above-the-line ad in November, you know the silly season is upon us. With so much revenue and profit generated in this quarter you can understand why the stakes are high. Ads increase exponentially in prime time slots to lure us and retailers live off the hope that the shopping public will spend their hard earned cash through their cash registers. Production values go up, a memorable ditty is sung and a plethora of celebrity smothers the campaign, but do retailers really need to spend so much on the celebrity endorsement? As a marketer, I fully embrace the necessity of advertising and I understand the value in it. I agree that prime time advertising slots are a must if you want to make an impact, as are production values, but based on the criticism lauded on the lacklustre impact Marks & Spencer's "Leading Ladies" campaign, can retailers justify the expense?
| | | | | | | Are you missing a trick by not viewing the humble email signature as a marketing tool? | | 12 November 2013, 10:28AM |  With the continued search towards one to one, highly personalised communication, organisations are spending a fortune on innovative, social media promotions, digital advertising and eCRM campaigns. Yet how much of this activity is actually seen by the right people? And how much of it is targeted, relevant and personalised? Yet a simple, accessible, valued, trusted and, all importantly, free way to dynamically communicate with customers, suppliers, prospects is being ignored by the vast majority of organisations.
| | | | Social media reporting: how to make it meaningful | | 11 November 2013, 11:43AM |  How many times have you found yourself in the following situation: you're in a meeting - no, worse - you're on a conference call, and everyone's talking about social reporting. On a screen in front of you is the first of an unforgivable number of slides. On every slide is a graph, allegedly showing you something different to the graph before; shifts in follower count, engagement rate and reach. (Only the last slide is different, it's the one that says, incongruously: "Thank you.") These reports are a bit boring, but they're important, right? If only you gave them your full attention, if only you 'got' the metrics a bit more, these reports would be Super Meaningful… right? Maybe. But in my experience, the majority of social media reporting is almost completely devoid of meaning.
| | | | iAnxiety; Apple, misery and the new class divide | | 11 November 2013, 10:30AM |  Therapy. You need to climb aboard that bandwagon, because all the indicators show that there has never been a greater demand for therapy. Did you know there is a worldwide increase in anxiety?
| | | | Google takes steps towards a fully-subscribed search service, to the detriment of advertisers | | 11 November 2013, 9:30AM |  Actions speak louder than words. At a time when "big data" analysis is driving intelligence into customer behaviour and beginning to underpin strategy marketers are clamouring to gain all the relevant insight they can get to stay ahead of the pack. Advertisers are required to sift and make sense of customer data coming in from dozens more channels than they ever were before. Social and mobile usage has quickly begun to play a huge role in changing advertisers' landscape, and the marketer's day job.
| | | | | | | John Lewis go digital first with their Christmas offering | | 08 November 2013, 12:35PM |  Department store John Lewis are one of the most established names in British retail, and their Christmas ads are usually a highlight of the festive season.
This year they have been decidedly modern and forward thinking with their Christmas campaign. Their lovely advert, “The Bear and The Hare”, has appeared on their official YouTube channel today, well over 24 hours before it makes its television debut in tomorrow night’s X-Factor.
| | | | The Culture of Now - The rise of imagery in social media | | 08 November 2013, 12:30PM |  The growth of social media sites with a focus on imagery rather than text, together with the rise in micro-video sharing, has resulted in a noticeable shift in the makeup of social media in 2013. A few years ago, people may have wondered whether Twitter's 140 characters could allow us to truly express ourselves. Now, however, it seems that a few frames of video footage or an image uploaded in a matter of seconds is plenty. This new trend, embraced by millions of social media users, is a direct result of the continued synergy between social media and the smartphone. The increased sophistication of the smartphone and the rise in the normality of social media use means that we now use smartphones as a transmitter of our every mood and emotion. The result is that we are now becoming participants in a new form of communication. As spontaneity has been encouraged, a culture of now has emerged as we learn to consume and share a flurry of information and imagery with a seemingly unquenchable thirst.
| | | | Piecing together the geotargeting puzzle | | 08 November 2013, 10:29AM |  The geotargeting of internet content has long been an established method of connecting with consumers in real-time. The benefits of doing so are readily apparent - consumers are 30-300% more likely to click a geotargeted ad versus untargeted; localised ecommerce offerings can increase conversion rates by as much as seven-fold; and geolocation can help reduce online fraud rates dramatically. As such, geotargeting technologies are deployed in a wide range of online applications, including advertising, ecommerce, publishing, social media and banking to present a safer, more relevant user experience.
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Back in 2011 online host Shira Lazar started her own show on US network CBS called What’s Trending. The title was fairly self explanatory – it looked at the people and the topics that were causing a stir online.
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