Media Down Under

I’ve spent the last year living and working in Sydney, Australia, but returned to London a few weeks ago and into the open arms of MC&C. When I tell people that I wasn’t forcibly removed from the Land Down Under and actually wanted to come back to England, their reaction is usually along the lines of a high pitched ‘REALLY?!’, followed by the incredulous raising of at least one eyebrow. It’s true though, I really did miss this city, and having now experienced working in direct response media on both sides of the globe, I have also developed a deeper appreciation of how we do things over here.

After arriving in Sydney I was fortunate enough to find work quickly, and joined MediaCom on two new pieces of business they’d won. One of my clients was Australia’s largest insurer, the other a new mobile telecoms start-up, lead by a group of entrepreneurs who had been there and done it in several European countries including Germany and Spain. Joining such a renowned agency and knowing I would be working on clients with extensive budgets, I was, perhaps naively, expecting to slot in to a large, well-established team, working with clients who were well prepared for the demands of creating successful DR campaigns.

This isn’t quite how it panned out. The insurer, despite being Australia’s largest, had only started using DR advertising a few months earlier, and it soon became apparent that to them DR was the ‘black sheep’ of the marketing family. Targets were set in a very inflexible manner, with their data department struggling to supply us with accurate numbers on which to report. The telecoms client was well versed in online media, but when it came to offline found it difficult to distinguish between measuring success on DR as opposed to brand metrics, when our strategy called for a careful mix of both.

Even within the agency, the amount of work needed to make DR successful for our clients was underestimated by senior management, although this was rectified later on, with additional recruits joining from their London office. Most difficult of all though was dealing with media owners, most of whom just did not seem to fully understand that we weren’t just trying to screw them down on price (not all the time, anyway) but that we really did have cost per response and ROI targets that we needed to achieve.

By the time I left, I was exhausted, having experienced what felt like uphill battles on all fronts in the name of direct response during my time there. I would like to think I won a few of those battles, if not the war, and I expect Australia will continue to look to the UK as it wakes up to the potential power of DR.

Kyle Seeley

Google Adwords - The Process to Achieving Google Certification Status

Did you know that the sponsored ads that appear when you make a search on Google are called Pay Per Click. This paid advertising on Google is managed by Google Adwords and at Mike Colling and Company we use Adwords to manage the PPC activity for a number of our clients. For our PPC clients, the fact that we are a Google Certified Partner is an important sign of credibility but what does the process involve and how hard is it to achieve? As the newest recruit to the digital team at MC&C, I’m the latest to have been through the process.

The Google Adwords Certification Program is a test accrediting PPC experts. It proves that certified professionals can handle a PPC account. The exam is in two parts. The first one, called “Advertising Fundamentals”, asks general questions about the Google Network, PPC, the bidding system etc. The second part of the exam is a specialisation in one of the four following areas: Reporting, Display, Search and Analysis. My specialisation was in Search.

Questions are about optimising the rank of a sponsored ad, getting the best quality score for an ad, the lowest bid etc, but also about other aspects of PPC that we don’t use every day such as the billing payments and account management.

For starters, as a non-native English person, the exam is particularly challenging! And if that wasn’t enough Google pose the questions in a complicated way. Sometimes all the four answers appear to be right, but only one really is. I found that the best way to prepare for it was to study, like any exam. And to help, Google Learning Centre recommends several articles about all aspects of Adwords and provides quizzes to test your knowledge. It might just be me but for my money, the quizzes were simpler than the actual exam!

The exams take two hours to complete and with more than 100 questions per exam, that’s approximately 1 minute per question – phew! And to ensure security, the test is done on a separate browser to prevent having other windows open at the same time.

But the revision and time taken has paid off. I’m delighted to say that passed both the fundamentals and the specialisation and am now officially qualified.

If you’d like to find out more about Google Adwords and how it could help your business please get in touch at melanie@mcand.co.uk.

Melanie Houget
Online Planner/Buyer

Using New Initiatives to Launch the RSPCA’s ‘Sponsor a Safe Little Place’

As we all know the RSPCA works really hard at preventing animal cruelty, encouraging animal welfare and rescues thousands of abused and neglected animals every year. It is this message that has been conveyed in their recent advertising campaigns.

Last week the RSPCA launched a new campaign, which is focusing on neglected cats and dogs. The campaign is called “Sponsor a safe little place”, to sponsor a kennel or a cat pod. The money raised through this campaign will go towards veterinary care, food, shelter, warm blankets and the love and attention they so desperately need.
For this campaign we planned the use of traditional media, DRTV, Direct Mail, Door Drop, Radio and Online along with some ‘new’ media activity, to target younger affluent females.

Concentrating within the vicinity of the branch that is the focus of this test, we had a stand within Bluewater shopping centre to kick start the launch of this new product, and to engage with potential donors and sign them up on the spot. This proved to be a really successful exercise: in fact, the number of sponsors who signed up was 37% above our target! Great news, not only did we beat our target but the feedback from the shoppers was that the stand gave a lot of information, and in most instances, people had learnt something they didn’t know about the RSPCA. They also liked the fact that they were speaking to someone face to face, to whom they could ask questions, but who wasn’t ‘pushing’ them to sign up in return.

The other event we organised was a dog walk – “Bark on the Beach” on the Isle of Wight and “ Bark in the Park” in Salisbury to raise awareness of the campaign launch. The dog walks took place last weekend, on the 1st October, the week leading up to the dog walks, each local radio station promoted the walk, with live reads and promotional trails. We picked the presenters for the promotion, who were avid dog lovers and who had dogs themselves. This gave additional support as the presenters were really passionate when they read the live reads, confirming that they themselves care about this cause.

During the actual walks, each station had live feeds back to the radio station, interviewing the participants who had signed up for sponsorship and stating why it was a good cause, in their opinion. This in itself was a great endorsement for the RSPCA, to have actual supporters giving heartfelt reasons why they support the charity and, in some cases, they had rescued a dog from their local RSPCA centre.
So the campaign is in its initial stages, but it’s certainly had a great start, by using these new initiatives, along with the traditional media , and making it personal to the sponsor.

If you would like to sponsor a kennel or cat pod please go to www.rspca.org.uk/safe

Vicky Nunn
TV Group Head