Along with millions of others I celebrated The Sun’s milestone anniversary: 40 years.
Having worked in media for nearly 35 years The Sun has been a remarkable constant in my working life. As a wet-behind-the-ears media buyer working on Hotpoint I remember the verbal assaults you received from the wild bunch at the Currant Bun, if you dared not to give them at the very least space parity with the Mirror.
I knew my career was on the up when the then ad manager Mike Moore complained to Chris Ingram about my unreasonableness and bloody mindedness. Result, a £50 spot bonus!
The Sun has fared pretty well over the last 40 years. It’s developed from a rude red top into a testimony of what makes Britain tick.
Its ability to muster public opinion is remarkable, from Guardian-esque environmental causes such as forcing Starbucks to turn off its taps, to deliciously spiteful barracking of hapless England football managers.
Iconic is an over-used expression but in the case of The Sun , especially relating to some of its headlines, it fits. Everyone has a favourite headline: mine is that gloriously succinct anti-Europe sentiment, “Up Yours, Delors”. Priceless.
In commercial terms, The Sun has maintained and enhanced its position as a major media force compared not to just other press titles but to the likes of Google and MSN. The well-trodden media fact that The Sun is read by more AB readers than The Times has even more validity, standing at 932,000. What’s more The Sun's persona has been successfully transferred to new media.
Love it or hate it The Sun just can’t be ignored. And long may it continue for the next 40 years!
Ian Prager, Planning Director
Monday 30 November 2009
Wednesday 25 November 2009
Using social media for marketing
Perhaps it’s the result of some deeply buried childhood experience but I can’t help categorising things.
And one thing that does need categorising is the way marketers use social media because a lot of people talk about it as though it is just a matter of reputation management.
Of course reputation management – monitoring conversations and where appropriate responding to them and guiding them – is important. But there are several other parts of marketing that can use social media. We can start with search marketing.
Search marketing is of course focussed around keywords and key phrases. Some social media tools monitoring are great at helping with this, and add an extra dimension to the insights derived from Google’s tools. For instance Alterian’s SM2 product will allow you to generate a cloud of keyword tags created by people writing blogs and other content. This is a really easy way of discovering concepts that people think are important on any day.
Tools like SM2 or IceRocket can also be used to influence messaging strategy. If you know what people are talking about, and what they want to hear about, they it is easier to create messages that will have impact.
For instance, what are the big issues with cars at the moment: is it reliability, economy, safety? At the time of writing fuel consumption trumps reliability for motor cars – but only if the term “economy” rather than “fuel consumption” is used. And safety is more important than either.
Social media can also be used for driving traffic to websites. This can be done in two ways.
The simpler way (not that simple really!) is to identify people who are talking about your brand or an issue you are trying to get associated with and send them links to information that will interest them in the hope that they will post your links and other people will see them.
Alternatively you can listen out for people talking about your brand or issue and send them information. This is of course may well be more time consuming if there are a lot of people talking about you but you can automate this to a degree using tools like SocialOomph which works with Twitter.
I had a sweet example of this the other day. Tweeting about late (early?) blooming camellias I was immediately followed by @lovethegarden (a web entity owned by The Scott’s Miracle Gro Company) who have a website (www.lovethegarden.com) of great interest to the camellia lover.
And finally there are marketing campaigns that use social media for launching products, generating awareness or favourability, or even generating sales. More on these another day!
Jeremy Swinfen Green
Digital Director
jeremy@mcand.co.uk
And one thing that does need categorising is the way marketers use social media because a lot of people talk about it as though it is just a matter of reputation management.
Of course reputation management – monitoring conversations and where appropriate responding to them and guiding them – is important. But there are several other parts of marketing that can use social media. We can start with search marketing.
Search marketing is of course focussed around keywords and key phrases. Some social media tools monitoring are great at helping with this, and add an extra dimension to the insights derived from Google’s tools. For instance Alterian’s SM2 product will allow you to generate a cloud of keyword tags created by people writing blogs and other content. This is a really easy way of discovering concepts that people think are important on any day.
Tools like SM2 or IceRocket can also be used to influence messaging strategy. If you know what people are talking about, and what they want to hear about, they it is easier to create messages that will have impact.
For instance, what are the big issues with cars at the moment: is it reliability, economy, safety? At the time of writing fuel consumption trumps reliability for motor cars – but only if the term “economy” rather than “fuel consumption” is used. And safety is more important than either.
Social media can also be used for driving traffic to websites. This can be done in two ways.
The simpler way (not that simple really!) is to identify people who are talking about your brand or an issue you are trying to get associated with and send them links to information that will interest them in the hope that they will post your links and other people will see them.
Alternatively you can listen out for people talking about your brand or issue and send them information. This is of course may well be more time consuming if there are a lot of people talking about you but you can automate this to a degree using tools like SocialOomph which works with Twitter.
I had a sweet example of this the other day. Tweeting about late (early?) blooming camellias I was immediately followed by @lovethegarden (a web entity owned by The Scott’s Miracle Gro Company) who have a website (www.lovethegarden.com) of great interest to the camellia lover.
And finally there are marketing campaigns that use social media for launching products, generating awareness or favourability, or even generating sales. More on these another day!
Jeremy Swinfen Green
Digital Director
jeremy@mcand.co.uk
Wednesday 18 November 2009
What’s Murdoch up to with Google?
What’s Murdoch up to with Google? Can he really mean to stop Google from spidering his sites so that people can’t find the news that he is planning to charge for?
It seems barmy.
But you’d be barmy to write Murdoch off as a luddite and a fool. He is certainly neither of those things by a long way. (Pace Stan Schroeder writing in mashable).
So why the - on the surface - rather odd stance?
Well, Google does need taming. I’ve nothing against Google personally; it’s my search engine of choice (or is that habit?). But it is a very dominant (far too dominant) player in the online advertising arena.
And that dominance, enhanced by ill-informed “last click counts” models of ROI analysis, is skewing the marketplace and taking advertising revenue away from editorially-based media owners like Murdoch’s newspapers.
(If you don’t believe that then ask yourself why online display dipped this year while search continued to grow.)
Murdoch wouldn’t necessarily lose that much by REPing his sites. He would of course lose the traffic from Google – but most of that traffic is from people searching on news stories, much of which is one-off, high-bounce traffic coming from overseas and which from an advertising perspective isn’t particularly valuable. Traffic from loyal media brand visitors would be unaffected.
My problem with this is that I don’t really believe that Murdoch would do much harm to Google if he turned his back on it.
Even if all the other commercial media owners followed him (and that's a big “if”, and even then presumably the BBC wouldn't play ball) then Google would just be a slightly different beast: a place where people search for products and goods but not for content. That would be pretty unlikely to affect Google’s PPC revenue which is founded on people who are searching for products and goods.
Google would still be the medium of choice for advertisers looking to generate click through to their sites. And, until advertisers learn that the last click doesn’t count for everything, it’s likely to remain so.
Jeremy Swinfen Green
Digital Director
It seems barmy.
But you’d be barmy to write Murdoch off as a luddite and a fool. He is certainly neither of those things by a long way. (Pace Stan Schroeder writing in mashable).
So why the - on the surface - rather odd stance?
Well, Google does need taming. I’ve nothing against Google personally; it’s my search engine of choice (or is that habit?). But it is a very dominant (far too dominant) player in the online advertising arena.
And that dominance, enhanced by ill-informed “last click counts” models of ROI analysis, is skewing the marketplace and taking advertising revenue away from editorially-based media owners like Murdoch’s newspapers.
(If you don’t believe that then ask yourself why online display dipped this year while search continued to grow.)
Murdoch wouldn’t necessarily lose that much by REPing his sites. He would of course lose the traffic from Google – but most of that traffic is from people searching on news stories, much of which is one-off, high-bounce traffic coming from overseas and which from an advertising perspective isn’t particularly valuable. Traffic from loyal media brand visitors would be unaffected.
My problem with this is that I don’t really believe that Murdoch would do much harm to Google if he turned his back on it.
Even if all the other commercial media owners followed him (and that's a big “if”, and even then presumably the BBC wouldn't play ball) then Google would just be a slightly different beast: a place where people search for products and goods but not for content. That would be pretty unlikely to affect Google’s PPC revenue which is founded on people who are searching for products and goods.
Google would still be the medium of choice for advertisers looking to generate click through to their sites. And, until advertisers learn that the last click doesn’t count for everything, it’s likely to remain so.
Jeremy Swinfen Green
Digital Director
Tuesday 17 November 2009
Behavioural Economics
My father can be a terrible old curmudgeon sometimes.
When asked by his friends what it is his only son and heir does for a living he has two stock answers. Depending on his mood he either says “He puts those annoying things in that fall out of your paper” or “He sells people rubbish they don’t need”.
Interesting views both, but they recently came back to me as I was sitting in the marvellously titled IPA seminar “Behavioural Economics: Red Hot or Red Herring?”
This is the latest big thing at Belgrave Square HQ. The one-liner is as follows: “behavioural economics is a collection of disparate theories which seek to explain irrational behaviour”.
We learned how putting a picture of some scary eyes above a sign makes people pay more for milk without having to change the wording on the sign.
We learned why it is better to sell a Bentley at a yacht show than at a car show.
And we learned why fruit and veg are the first things you see in Tesco.
(Answers respectively: subliminal influence, comparative pricing, and over-purchasing of the first thing you see combined with high margins).
But why do we care?
Essentially, in a world in which the consumer’s attention is harder to gain and in which big ideas are more valuable than media buying, there is a wealth of knowledge which can make our marketing more efficient, more effective, and more innovative.
Super!
Except not, I thought. This is all very well, especially for a committed lateral thinker and crossword nut like myself, but how can we hope to introduce this into the way we work? I wholly agree that the future of media revenues is in creation of ideas that have long term impact rather than the day to day planning and buying grind, but how do we convince clients of this?
It is a strange phenomenon of the media industry that clients pay in direct proportion to the least valuable portion of what we do - i.e. media booking rather than the theory behind it. The trouble is that to change this would take a massive leap of faith on the client side as well as agencies being able to make initiatives such as behavioural economics transparent in the age of accountability that we live in.
I like to think of a great ideas as something that tells you what to do in ten years time, and what to do tomorrow. And this is the trouble, agency side: I want to get paid tomorrow, not in ten years, which means I charge for tomorrow.
So I really don’t see the status quo changing. I absolutely believe that there is something in behavioural economics, but for the time being it will be confined to interesting, but probably unrewarded, high-level thinking of how our clients can sell their stuff more effectively, while plain old media fees and commissions from bits of 200 gsm paper continue to pay my mortgage.
Tim Part, Business Development Manager
When asked by his friends what it is his only son and heir does for a living he has two stock answers. Depending on his mood he either says “He puts those annoying things in that fall out of your paper” or “He sells people rubbish they don’t need”.
Interesting views both, but they recently came back to me as I was sitting in the marvellously titled IPA seminar “Behavioural Economics: Red Hot or Red Herring?”
This is the latest big thing at Belgrave Square HQ. The one-liner is as follows: “behavioural economics is a collection of disparate theories which seek to explain irrational behaviour”.
We learned how putting a picture of some scary eyes above a sign makes people pay more for milk without having to change the wording on the sign.
We learned why it is better to sell a Bentley at a yacht show than at a car show.
And we learned why fruit and veg are the first things you see in Tesco.
(Answers respectively: subliminal influence, comparative pricing, and over-purchasing of the first thing you see combined with high margins).
But why do we care?
Essentially, in a world in which the consumer’s attention is harder to gain and in which big ideas are more valuable than media buying, there is a wealth of knowledge which can make our marketing more efficient, more effective, and more innovative.
Super!
Except not, I thought. This is all very well, especially for a committed lateral thinker and crossword nut like myself, but how can we hope to introduce this into the way we work? I wholly agree that the future of media revenues is in creation of ideas that have long term impact rather than the day to day planning and buying grind, but how do we convince clients of this?
It is a strange phenomenon of the media industry that clients pay in direct proportion to the least valuable portion of what we do - i.e. media booking rather than the theory behind it. The trouble is that to change this would take a massive leap of faith on the client side as well as agencies being able to make initiatives such as behavioural economics transparent in the age of accountability that we live in.
I like to think of a great ideas as something that tells you what to do in ten years time, and what to do tomorrow. And this is the trouble, agency side: I want to get paid tomorrow, not in ten years, which means I charge for tomorrow.
So I really don’t see the status quo changing. I absolutely believe that there is something in behavioural economics, but for the time being it will be confined to interesting, but probably unrewarded, high-level thinking of how our clients can sell their stuff more effectively, while plain old media fees and commissions from bits of 200 gsm paper continue to pay my mortgage.
Tim Part, Business Development Manager
Tuesday 10 November 2009
Farewell LondonLite
I, for one, will be sorry when the last edition of London Lite hits the streets on Friday 13th.
I’m already missing those purple jacketed distributors irritatingly shouting "free London paper, free London paper, free London paper", as they shoved a copy of thelondonpaper in your hand.
There has always been the big debate as to whether the free, London evening newspapers offered real news, but they have been a must for me on the long journey home after work.
Whether you want a few snippets of news, a bit of gossip, sports info, a look at your Stars or if only to see the endless pics of celebs looking worse for wear, falling out of nightclubs in the early hours of the morning, the newspapers were free, for goodness sake.
It was also refreshing to see how creatively the various ad shapes and sizes were utilised by advertisers, when allowed to produced something entirely different from the norm. Not many newspapers have offered the creativity, seamlessly merged with editorial that was allowed in the LondonLite - strange shapes, corner pieces etc. Which publisher will rise to that challenge now?
From an advertising point of view, there are those who say that the titles were not read and were a useless vehicle for branding and response advertisers, maybe because they were seen littering the carriages of tubes and trains.
However, if they were taken, read and left behind, does that mean that, as consumers, we did not absorb the information within? I have been known, on the odd occasion, to tear out an advertisement from one of these newspapers, seeing something that interested me, and follow up on-line or by phone. I’m just a consumer like the rest of those readers?
The sad truth is, that despite reaching a large audience, with a fresh new approach to editorial format, the numbers just did not add up. During the recession and with so much competition in the marketplace, all chasing the same advertiser money pot, the titles could not survive and profit.
Well, we still have Metro in the mornings but now we are left with the FREE London Evening Standard as our choice after work. We’ll just have to wait and see how that title evolves...
Jackie Irish
I’m already missing those purple jacketed distributors irritatingly shouting "free London paper, free London paper, free London paper", as they shoved a copy of thelondonpaper in your hand.
There has always been the big debate as to whether the free, London evening newspapers offered real news, but they have been a must for me on the long journey home after work.
Whether you want a few snippets of news, a bit of gossip, sports info, a look at your Stars or if only to see the endless pics of celebs looking worse for wear, falling out of nightclubs in the early hours of the morning, the newspapers were free, for goodness sake.
It was also refreshing to see how creatively the various ad shapes and sizes were utilised by advertisers, when allowed to produced something entirely different from the norm. Not many newspapers have offered the creativity, seamlessly merged with editorial that was allowed in the LondonLite - strange shapes, corner pieces etc. Which publisher will rise to that challenge now?
From an advertising point of view, there are those who say that the titles were not read and were a useless vehicle for branding and response advertisers, maybe because they were seen littering the carriages of tubes and trains.
However, if they were taken, read and left behind, does that mean that, as consumers, we did not absorb the information within? I have been known, on the odd occasion, to tear out an advertisement from one of these newspapers, seeing something that interested me, and follow up on-line or by phone. I’m just a consumer like the rest of those readers?
The sad truth is, that despite reaching a large audience, with a fresh new approach to editorial format, the numbers just did not add up. During the recession and with so much competition in the marketplace, all chasing the same advertiser money pot, the titles could not survive and profit.
Well, we still have Metro in the mornings but now we are left with the FREE London Evening Standard as our choice after work. We’ll just have to wait and see how that title evolves...
Jackie Irish
Thursday 5 November 2009
Should PR "own" social media?
The PR industry seems to be trying to own social media. I wonder whether this is really appropriate?
Recently I went to a seminar on social media where the focus was heavily on traditional PR techniques.
Now of course some PR techniques do have an important part to play in social media. But you can go way beyond reputation management by seeding blogs and posting photos on Flickr in this space.
Social media can be used very effectively for many other things including:
customer service
marketplace analysis
new product development
search marketing, paid and organic
recruitment
customer retention
customer acquisition
None of these were covered in the seminar.
Perhaps that was because these disciplines are not central to PR.
In addition, PR agencies may be tempted to conflate social media with online PR techniques.
So at the seminar I was subjected to a lecture on SEO PR – which hasn’t got much to do with social media!
And I was told that the way to measure campaign effectiveness was to measure the effect of seeded blogs: with no acknowledgement of the need to track blogs that hadn’t been seeded.
Any advertiser looking at social media (and who isn't?) should understand that social media techniques can enhance many aspects of a business and are not only effective in the PR space.
Jeremy Swinfen Green
Digital Director
Recently I went to a seminar on social media where the focus was heavily on traditional PR techniques.
Now of course some PR techniques do have an important part to play in social media. But you can go way beyond reputation management by seeding blogs and posting photos on Flickr in this space.
Social media can be used very effectively for many other things including:
customer service
marketplace analysis
new product development
search marketing, paid and organic
recruitment
customer retention
customer acquisition
None of these were covered in the seminar.
Perhaps that was because these disciplines are not central to PR.
In addition, PR agencies may be tempted to conflate social media with online PR techniques.
So at the seminar I was subjected to a lecture on SEO PR – which hasn’t got much to do with social media!
And I was told that the way to measure campaign effectiveness was to measure the effect of seeded blogs: with no acknowledgement of the need to track blogs that hadn’t been seeded.
Any advertiser looking at social media (and who isn't?) should understand that social media techniques can enhance many aspects of a business and are not only effective in the PR space.
Jeremy Swinfen Green
Digital Director
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