Category: Marketing

  • There’s No Such Thing as an Awareness Campaign

    Yesterday, at the annual UK IAB Engage event, there was much debate about the role that digital marketing can play in brand-building, as opposed to direct-response, marketing. The assembled agency experts were broadly in agreement that digital still falls short when it comes to brand-building work, although its value is growing as consumers spend more…

  • Promoted Tweets–do they work?

    I’ve previously shared some stats on the top performing Promoted Tweets and, no surprise, the one thing they all have in common is that they all say something remarkable or newsworthy. With clickthrough rates as high as 52%, advertisers could be forgiven for thinking Promoted Tweets are the Holy Grail they’ve been longing for. But…

  • Shock news: Over 90 percent of conversations happen offline

    It’s a wake-up call for any digital marketer who’s spent too long supping the intoxicating brew delivered through their ADSL line: More than 9 in every 10 conversations take place offline. Yes, offline, in the real world, where human beings apparently talk to other human beings via a one-to-one interface. I know, unbelievable, but true.…

  • Marketing Essentials: The Psychology of Sharing

    In case you hadn’t noticed, we live in a sharing economy. Thanks to innovations on the social web and advances in our internet-connected mobile devices, we think nothing today of sharing the content and information we discover. Of course, we’ve always shared information, that’s not new. But the speed and ease with which sharing now…

  • Daft Ideas for Social Media: Post each update everywhere

    It’s tempting when using social media networks to want to simultaneously post each update to lots of networks. It’s a great time-saver and applications like Tweetdeck and Seesmic can even automate this task for you completely. But are you sure you want to post the exact same update to lots of networks? While this might…

  • Why women are easy and size matters for men

    In the categories labelled “Gross Generalisations” and “Blindingly Obvious” I present to you, dear reader, proof of what you may have suspected all along: men and women are very different, and women crack sooner under the advertiser’s spell. A study by comScore of 292 television ad copy tests shows that women are more likely to…

  • LinkedIn: very different to other social networks [plus infographic]

    LinkedIn has firmly established itself as the world’s leading professional social network, used by around 100 million people around the world to promote their work and life experiences and network with likeminded individuals. But the way people use LinkedIn differs dramatically to the behaviours we see on Facebook, Twitter and many other networking forums. Most…

  • Being remarkable: Rethinking the receipt

    We produce billions of them every day and I’ll bet most people reading this will have at least one in their pocket or bag right now. But the humble sales receipt has barely evolved in recent years, despite the power inside most cash registers having increased exponentially. Cue London-based design studio, BERG, who have carried…

  • UK population mapped: It’s true, we Brits retire to the coast

    Data, data everywhere, but not a drop to drink… Like most marketers, I love a good dataset. And the latest batch from the Office of National Statistics shows how the UK population has changed in recent years. The DataBlog team at The Guardian have mapped some of the key stats, including this interesting view showing…

  • Sunday Times launches The Social List

    [See author’s note below for update] The Sunday Times is well known for its annual Rich List. So, what better way to inject a little 21st century than by inventing The Social List, an automated league table that lists the most social-web-connected  people in the world? Anyone can sign up to join. The Social List…