MarCom Professional

With Christmas fast approaching, there will be plenty of people hoping for smartphones in stockings this year. Amongst them will be Google, who’ve just shelled out £449 million on Admob, a mobile advertising company. Dumping such a huge pot of cash on mobile has been seen as preparing for mass market adoption of smartphones.

It’s expected that soon there will be millions more smartphone owners eagerly consuming content, and the ads to go with it. But in all this anticipation for smartphones, are some companies missing out on a mass market mobile marketing opportunity that already exists? Now don’t get me wrong: More...

    Cynical, fickle and easily bored, these are just some of the reasons why teenagers are difficult to market to. In the past, marketers have struggled to reach this younger segment, but, thanks to the amount of time they’re spending online, the opportunities for engaging with teenagers are growing. Persuading them to listen to you is tricky though because teenagers have grown up with marketing; they’re savvy enough to ignore anything that’s inauthentic, has nothing to offer them or tries too hard to be cool.  So how can you deliver market that appeals to teenagers, rather than comes across as an embarrassing dad? These tips should help: More...

With marketing so fragmented these days, even the biggest brands risk slipping up trying something new. And it’s been Pepsi left blushing after its iPhone app, ‘Amp Up Before You Score’, attracted the wrong sort of headlines for pigeonholing women (around half its customers). It’s certainly one experiment they won’t be in a rush to repeat.

Whilst most don’t backfire so spectacularly, there’s no shortage of poorly conceived iPhone apps created by brands. But there are also some great ones too, which reflect what the brand is about and extend the marketing experience onto the popular mobile device. More...

There was a time when the biggest surprise you’d find in a packet of Cornflakes was a plastic toy. But soon you could be finding logos floating in your bowl of cereal after Kelloggs announced plans to laser ‘brand’ individual flakes. Kelloggs hopes this rather extravagant measure will differentiate its cereal from cheaper imitations, highlighting the plight many luxury brands face in persuading customers to pay for the real thing. Whilst counterfeiting is nothing new, the scale at which imitation products are being made and sold has grown to a whole new level in recent years. Many brands blame the recession and the internet for their piracy woes. More...

Nearly two years after its release, it seems as though iPhones are becoming overloaded with gimmicky apps that get deleted after only two days. And this is particularly true when the app has been created as part of a marketing campaign. Last year I commented on why iPhone apps were at the top of many brands’ Christmas wish list. Ever since Stanley Works released their virtual spirit level, brands have been pumping out mobile apps on an industrial scale. To be fair, it’s easy to understand why. A recent Wireless Expertise study estimated the number of smartphones sold per year worldwide will rise from 165 million to 423 million by 2013. More...

 

Last month a woman who works for the BCQ Group (which bda is part of) was in a major motorcycle accident and suffered serious injuries. On hearing the news, a team at BCQ whipped into action to organise a Quiz Night and Charity Auction to raise money to aid her rehabilitation.

The event’s on 13 October at the Buckingham Town Hall, and already over 30 teams have entered. But what’s been even more inspiring is the number of people not directly connected to BCQ who’ve come forward to donate to the cause. We’re lucky enough to be located in the midst of Formula 1 team territory, with a number of team headquarters nearby, along with the Silverstone racetrack. More...

Advertising agencies are notoriously male dominated, which is a problem when the majority of your customers are female. The fact is that rising female spending power is causing a shift in how products are designed and sold. And it will be those able to deliver marketing that’s appealing to women who’ll prosper. Those who continue to think we only live in a man’s world will fade away. A few facts:

• 85% of US household purchase decisions are made by women (National Federation of Woman Business Owners)
• Women spend 10% more on the internet than men (Verdict Research)
• 91% of women say ‘advertisers don’t understand us’ (Martha Barletta, in ‘Marketing to Women’)

The web turns female

At ad:tech London, this week, a consultant from trend forecasters The Future Laboratory announced that the web turned female last year, meaning that there are now more female users than men. More...

According to a recent study many of the top brands struggle when it comes to being loved. In fact, none of them scored above 30% at the ‘love score’ amongst customers, based on criteria such as whether the brand ‘makes time to reward me’, ‘relates to me best’ or ‘cares about me more than just money’.

So what’s gone wrong with the top brands’ love lives? Why aren’t they creating the emotional connections that are supposed to come from millions spent on marketing? Well, the low levels of affection for brands have been blamed on a lack of personalised engagement. More...

[caption id="attachment_748" align="alignleft" width="223" caption="Andy looking surprisingly good in lurid green"][/caption] Big congratulations to Andy who completed his second Great North Run yesterday, raising £480 for Leukemia Research UK. Shaving five minutes off his 2008 time, Andy completed the half marathon in a highly respectable 1 hour 57 minutes.  He finished in 9,819th position, leaving 44,181 other runners behind him in the dust. We’re impressed, despite the fact that he was overtaken by someone wearing a Scooby Doo costume on the home stretch! Thanks to everyone who sponsored Andy  and don’t be surprised if he tries to hit you up for some sponsorship for next year’s London Marathon .... More...

How can you make money from a user base that hates advertising and doesn’t want to pay for content? Well, that’s a puzzle all media companies seem to be struggling with at the moment. Whether it’s newspapers, commercial TV or Facebook, no one has yet worked out how to monetise content with advertising people are happy to receive. But that doesn’t stop them trying…

ITV gets the law changed

Commercial TV has, at least, been thrown a lifeline (albeit a thin one). Almost exactly a year ago we discussed on the bda blog ITV’s ill fated experiments with ad overlay technology, which could have had viewers spitting out their tea when ghostly slogans started appearing on walls and on people’s foreheads. More...