The social media site that dominates our lives is powering on through 2014 and has introduced a number of changes;

Investments at Facebook - Facebook is set to make ‘large, strategic’ technological investments in a bid to boost mobile revenue and a major force in premium advertiser monetisation.      
Quick Stats;

• Advertising revenue has risen 64% year-on-year to £1.8bn in the three months to September, with two thirds of that coming from the mobile side.
• On mobile, 1.12 billion people now use Facebook each month
• 703 million people every day, nearly 40% growth from this time last year

Places Directory - Facebook's new Places Directory has been discretely released and will be spark fierce competition with directory sites such as Yelp. Places Directory allows you to search the globe for destinations and then narrow down your searches for bars, hotels, restaurants, gyms, landmarks and many more attractions. It's strength lies in the fact results are ranked by user ratings and show comments from your Facebook friends. Places Directory taps into Facebook's existing technology such as Graph Search, Page Locations API, and other elements.

The Online Marketing Institute has identified the most the largest talent gaps and most in-demand digital skills of 2014. The 'State of Digital Marketing Talent' study consisted of interviewing 747 advertising and Fortune 500 marketing executives to find out what skills their teams possessed and which were most desired.

The Missing Skills: It's striking that talent is perceived to be a 1/3 short of where it should be. This could have a detrimental affect on performance, identify your talent gaps within your company and address them. As an individual, look where the gaps might be in your team and gain a greater understanding of these skills (making yourself more valuable to the company).

Lenovo - Following a very successful 12 months, Chinese company Lenovo aims to become a 'top 10 brand' in Europe. As a result they have hired Jo Moore from Ogilvy & Mather as EMEA brand and consumer marketing director in a bid to push on in European markets. Moore will report to EMEA vice president Jan Huckfeldt, who described the new appointment will support the brand’s marketing strategy switch from “monologue to dialogue” in the region. Jo Moore joins from Ogilvy & Mather, where she was worldwide managing director for global brands and her one of her clients was Motorola, who Lenovo plan to acquire out this year.

NFL - The National Football League has named a new chief marketing officer as it faces mounting pressure from both fans and sponsors due to publicity it has received for not taking domestic violence seriously as a result of a number of incidents that have directly effected the game. Dawn Hudson, former Pepsi senior marketer, has been handed the responsibility. She takes over from Mark Weller who has returned to his previous role of over seeing international expansion of the NFL. This news follows the NFL's appointment of four female consultants to improve domestic violence policies. Time will tell whether these appointments will change the organisation internally or just please stakeholders.

Dixons - Ian McGregor has been appointed by Dixons Carphone as marketing communications director and tasked with leading marketing for the Currys PC World brand. McGregors experience includes his last role as Vice President of marketing at Activision, a senior marketing role at Eletronic Arts, and board account director at London agency Publicis. In his role he will oversee advertising creative, media buying, visual store communications and consumer PR.

Telefonica - Daniel Rosen has been appointed Global Director of advertising for O2 owner Telefonica. He leaves his position as Global CEO of mobile ad agency Joule. Rosen has been hired in order to accelerate revenue growth and product innovation by building closer relationships with the brand, publisher and agencies.

Ab InBev - Former Coca-cola marketer Nick Robinson has joined Ab InBev as UK and Ireland brand chief. He will be overseeing top alcoholic brands such as Stella Artois and Budweiser, who are currently enjoying strong sales on the back of a successful world cup campaign. It is believed that a key factor in Robinson's appointment was his expertise in the soft drinks market, as Ab InBev look to expand their offerings to customers.

Coca-Cola - Following the retirement of Joe Tripodi, Coca-Cola has moved to Marcos De Quinto as chief marketing officer. He moves from his current dual role as VP of the company’s Iberian business and vice president of its pan-European steering group, a role he's been in since 2000. De Quinto has a vast amount of global strategic marketing experience that Coca-Cola will be hoping will help them through a period of disappointing growth

The latest study from the Advertising Association has shown a 8.5% rise in advertising spend to a grand total of £4.5 billion in the three months leading to June. This is the highest spending we've seen since late 2010. It is believed a maturing attitude to digital marketing played a key role behind this growth, with Internet (17.2%), Radio (17.7%) and Display (5%) all having strong quarters.

Although the growth for the rest of this year is expected to slow to 5%, if we look to 2015 demand for Display will push Internet spending to £8.1 billion (compared to the projected £7.5 billion for 2014). Search marketing is also predicted for strong growth figures next year, growing from £3.9bn to £4.3bn between 2014 and 2015.

Tim Lefroy chief executive of the Advertising Association, says the performance of digital media so far in 2014 points to “digital and creative leadership in e-commerce”. The insight is supported by companies such as Mondelez and Diageo tightening the link between online advertisements and search marketing to move further into ecommerce, which is considered a well of untapped potential for food and drink marketers. Around 60% of UK GDP is household consumption – one of the highest – according to the Advertising Association and “e and m commerce are an increasingly large part of that picture”.

Ad spend was up across the media mix, they were all down in the first quarter of the year, but posted rises in the following quarter. The latest Bellwether report, which said over 25% of companies planned to increase the marketing spend.

This free tool will let users download customised data and market-specific information in order to help understand how individuals use the internet. Google describe it as a tool that will deliver "consumer insights to support planning and decision-making in a fast changing digital landscape".

They break it down into three areas;

• The Multiscreen world - Aims to quantify and understand Internet usage and attitudes across various devices. The base of this section is the entire population, both on and offline.
• The Smart Shopper - Focuses on the consumer purchase journey and the role of the Internet in making purchase decisions.
• The Smart Viewer - Provides insight into people's recent online video use across different devices.

Snapshot of Multiscreen World in Consumer Barometer

Creating a personal experience for the consumer is nothing groundbreaking and is often what some brands strive to create, but we take a look at 3 brands that are taking this to the next level through innovation

Burberry - On the 30th of September Burberry announced it's latest initiative have led to a 55% increase in sales over a 6 month period. The campaign allowed customers to customise bottles of the 'Mr Burberry' fragrance, this then tied in with 4OD and Google's ad network to preview adverts with the customised bottles and viewers initials. The ability to see your own customised bottle in an advert creates a real personal touch and potentially a decisive factor in the consumers purchasing decision. The campaign was fronted by two of Britain's most iconic models, Kate Moss and Cara Delvingne, proving to be another great success from Christopher Bailey, in which he sets!



ASOS - The daddy of e-commerce recently announced some changes to its shopping experience with the intention to create a 'more edited and personalised' as it draws closer to its £2.5 billion sales target in 2015. ASOS are looking to move slightly away from their model of browsing through thousands of products, as Chief Executive Nick Robertson suggest the novelty of this is 'starting to wane', with their range growing at such a rapid rate the shopping experience must remain relevant to the user. Following on from their "As Seen on Me" feature, ASOS is allowing shoppers to follow stylist who 'flush up' new products which they believe is a 'clean, simple' way of editing choice. It doesn't stop there as ASOS also plans to roll out recommendations and personalised product ideas based on previous browsing and shopping behaviour, later this year.

Lidl - The German retailer plans on launching a specific website that consumers to get more engaged with the brand, as part of a larger plan to build a community for the brand. Marketing Director Arnd Pickhardt describes it as "We want to offer customers that want to go a step further in terms of engaging with the brand another opportunity. It’s about giving access to information earlier than others, letting them try and test products".

The actions of pressure group, Greenpeace, have led to Lego ending it's 50 year old marketing partnership with oil giant Shell.



Greenpeace targeted Lego, in a technique that has been refereed to as brand jacking, the Youtube campaign they produced called 'Everything is not awesome' now has over 6.5 million views. The video was comprised using lego pieces which showed a horrific oil spill in an arctic environment and the devastation it caused.

This story is reminiscent of how many brands departed ways with SeaWorld after pressure from public groups and the publicity of the documentary 'Black Fish'. Virgin America dropped SeaWorld from its airline reward programme, while one of its top corporate sponsors SouthWest Airlines ended its 26 year partnership. Other organisations such as American Express also ditched SeaWorld.



Shell must be wary that there is not a similar knock on effect, particularly with the brand jacking technique which can really gain traction and raise awareness among the public.

It's quite an achievement to be just 8 weeks old and people are championing you as the one to break the Facebook social media monopoly. That's whats happening to new social network 'Ello' though, with the link between the two also stemming from Ello's perceived dislike of Facebook. If you disagree with the Ello manifesto on their website you are then forwarded to Facebook's privacy page (a nice touch!). Their founder, Paul Budnitz, describes Facebook as "an advertising platform not a social network". The Irony is that you were probably made aware of Ello through Facebook. And to find you're friends on Ello, you'll probably have to write a status on Facebook asking them if they're on it!

However, we can't help but think of Diaspora, the once hyped social network. Everyone likes an underdog, but sustaining that takes something really revolutionary. It's early days and therefore it could go two ways, but the fact its exclusive and getting a lot of coverage means it has people's attention, and as a result it hit 50,000 new member requests per hour at some points last week. Tech experts have a mixture of positive and negative views on Ello with our favourite being the Verge calling it “a doomed utopia we can’t stop building.”

Paul Budnitz has a bit of a habit of making success stories from unlikely ventures, potentially a reason his Ello concept is being held in high regard. From a luxury bicycle company, Budnitz Bicycles to Kidrobot, a company that creates art toys and high end fashion accessories (Pharrell Williams is said to be a big fan!), Paul is used to scepticism in his ideas. With the social media space already overcrowded, someone like Budnitz might just be able to discover an unlikely niche.

What really sets it apart it how it plans to make money. Replicating the very successful concept of the iPhone/App store, in which users will be able to completely customise their own Ello with a combination of basic (free features) and add-on features. Its firm stance on being 'anti-advertisement' should be what sets it apart from other social networks.

• Marketing share is down to 28.8%, lowest in decades.
• More competitive environment with newcomers gaining market share. Aldi sales increased by 29.1% and Lidl sales were up by 17.7%.
• Tesco has seen over £2 billion wiped off its market share.
• Tesco's third biggest investor, BlackRock, sold £150 million worth of shares.
• Share price is down by a staggering 40% in the past year
• Four senior directors have been suspended, while the Serious Fraud Office and the Financial Conduct Authority are said to be looking into the situation.

Last week it was announced that Phones4U went into administration, putting 5,596 jobs at more than 700 outlets at risk, after Vodafone, EE and O2 did not renew their contracts with the company.

Original founder, John Caudwell, described it as an "unprecedented assassination" as he believes the mobile giants may have congregated about ending their contracts with Phones4U. Are they under any obligation to continue trading with Phones 4U though?

However, EE argued that its decision to end its relationship with Phones 4U was strategic, as they look to focus on their own shops and cut out intermediaries. They seemed to of hugely benefitted from the Phones 4U collapse as they have strengthened their position and bought out 58 Phones 4U stores.

Can the middle man survive on the high street now? Being a middle man can be a very profitable role but also highly risk as there is a lack of power. With EE looking to 'cut out intermediaries', will this relate to other retailers such as Carphone Warehouse in the future? This move seems to open up many questions regarding trading in the mobile environment.

While private equity firm BC (that owned Phones 4U) has been criticised for loading the retailer with more than £200m debt. Unfortunately Phones 4U staff will pay the price for this irresponsibility.

In hindsight it seems like a mess, it also shows just how fragile a reputable high retailer is in the 21st century. Could this have a knock on affect to other industries as they look to cut out intermediaries and increase security in a fragile environment? Only time will tell.

Another month goes by and Facebook release another update. They take the expressions "Staying on top of your game" to another level!

"Why don't you like the adverts?"

This week Facebook announced that it will start asking users for more information after they click to hide an advert. With the new feature, users will be presented with a number of options for why they are hiding the ad, including:

1. It’s not relevant to me
2. I keep seeing this
3. It’s offensive or inappropriate
4. It’s spam
5. Something else

The purpose is to try and improve the experience for users, and will also use the information to better target ads to other users on the site.

This may seem a little frustrating for users as its obvious that no one likes adverts! But this will be really beneficial for brands as it increases the effectiveness of targeting ads on the social platform.

Facebook; Power Editor Update

Facebook plans to roll out a number of updates to its Power Editor this month, which will make it much easier for advertisers to prepare and also preview adverts before launching them.

Facebook said the following on their planned changes; “In the past, since these ads were anchored to page posts, they were not changeable. With this change, advertisers can now create News Feed ads at scale, preview them during creation, edit them at any time, and bulk import/export them.”

Facebook is also updating its objectives, and will provide a number of new options for advertisers to choose to help Facebook optimize their ad performance.

These options include:

1. Clicks to Website
2. Website Conversions
3. Page post engagement for photos
4. Video View

These changes should simplify the process greatly for advertisers, particularly first timer users. It also makes it more accessible for people who are daunted by technology, especially when it involves parting with cash.

Facebook is Sharing King!

A new report from Fractl shows that over 8 in 10 shares on social sites are on Facebook!

Fractl analysed the one million most-shared articles from the first six months of 2014. Collectively, these articles generated more than 2.6 billion shares, and 81.9 percent of these happened on Facebook!

To put this into perspective here's the rankings of the other social sites; Twitter  (8.6 percent), Google+ (4.3 percent), Pinterest (3 percent), and LinkedIn (2.2 percent).

Social sharing has become a crucial part of online marketing and this information should be at the forefront of your mind when creating content. Every post should have a clear goal and be tailored to the social site(s) you (or your followers) plan to share this content on.

Homeaway - The online holiday rental company took the decision to appoint former Visa and Vodafone marketer Mariano Dima as chief marketing officer. A newly created role that will oversee all global marketing, corporate communications and brand initiatives. Dima's CV includes 20 years of marketing, product and business development for brands that cinlude PepsiCo, Vodafone, Levi Straus and Visa.

Regus - Eva Eisenschimmel has become the latest senior marketing executive to join Regus. She follows Rick Vlemmiks who joined as their most senior marketer last year. Eisenschimmel, who left Lloyds earlier this year after three years as group marketing director, joins in september and has been tasked with looking after the company’s global marketing efforts.

Ryanair - Ryanair has appointed John Hurley as its first chief technology officer, this move comes as Rynair attempts to forge its 'online travel revolution' that will ‘change the world of online air travel’.
Hurley will be responsibile for developing its fledgling digital and technology strategy, with the company in the process of recruiting a team of up to 200 people across marketing, content and strategy that Hurley will oversee. Hurley joins from educational publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt where he was vice president of software development.

Instagram - James Quarles has made the move from parent company Facebook to his new role as global head of business and brand development for Instagram.
Quarles will be responsible for the overall growth of Instagram as well as “building a broad asset of solutions for brands of all sizes on Instagram”.
The move means he will have to relocate from London to Instagram’s US headquarters and report into the company’s founder and CEO Kevin Systrom.
Instagram has been “deliberately” slowly rolling out advertising on the app since it first began trialling ads with a small group of brands in the US last November. Read more about Instagrams new features.

National Trust - Jordan replaces Clare Mullen, who left 4 weeks ago to move to India. She will take over towards the end of the year, although a date has not yet been set. Harry Heeley, previously commercial director at the Trust, is running the marketing department in the interim.
Jordan’s appointment comes as the National Trust renews its focus on digital. It will relaunch its website and mobile app at the start of next year to shift away from just providing information about its properties to offering more engaging content personalised to visitors based on where they live and their previous visits.

Buzzfeed - BuzzFeed has appointed ad sales veteran Greg Coleman as its new president with the task of ramping up its social advertising offering to brands. He joins from Criteo, where he was president. His other experience includes being a former president and chief revenue officer at Huffington Post and vice president of sales at Yahoo. Coleman replaces Jon Steinberg who left last month to join the MailOnline.
In addition to overseeing sales, creative services, marketing and products and business development, he is tasked with securing a greater share of brands’ ad budget for Buzzfeed’s social advertising offering.

Celebrity endorsement is a classic marketing technique used by many brands, but is it still relevant and effective?

Recent academic research studied celebrity endorsement in the charity sector; it aimed to find out if celebrities were actually effective practice for charities and whether it makes the public more likely to donate or give their time for the cause.

Snapchat has been with us for over 18 months now, it's becoming hugely popular in a short space of time and takes up another precious widget space on our smartphones. We've seen that Facebook tried to buy it for $3 million and in May 2014 it was said that over 700 million pictures were being sent per day! So how can you utilise this platform to grow your brand?

• The first thing is that is no clear way of doing it - not like other social media channels which encourage advertising on their platform and even have guides or specialised components to assist you. If you decided to advertise on snapchat, you're pretty much on your own and have to learn from success stories or trail and error.

• This brings us on the next point, because theres no 'correct formula', its well worth checking out other examples. Big brands are really experimenting and trailing different things. A popular use of it is to give a discount code available only to snapchat users and lasting 24 hours.

• How do you stay in someones mind when you have only 10 seconds? It's the ultimate marketing challenge. It's needs to be engaging and also unique, as well as rememberable.

• We currently have a story telling culture in marketing, this has been evident in the rise of Storytelling roles. Snapchat is a very simplistic app with few features, but one of those is 'Story'. This allows users to create stories made up of 10 second videos that can be watched in a 24 hour period.

• It's advert free which means you're not directly competing. Other platforms have paid advertising which can work against yourself. When you combine this with the fact that most brands aren't using it and it isn't geared towards advertising then it almost doesn't feel like you're being targeted when you get one.

• Don't take it too seriously! Snapchat's whole concept is built on varnishing, it's never going to be your most important digital platform but its worth playing around with. It's also worth noting that there's no analytics beyond seeing the number of followers you have. Snapchat finds friends based on phone contacts, therefore for a brand it can be very hard to initially build up a following and would need another channel to push users to Snapchat.

Here's some examples to get you started:

CK One fragrance celebrated it's 20 year landmark with a huge campaign that involved a print media, snapchat and tumblr. They used snapchat to share content from the shoot and engage both ways with users.

Frozen yogurt chain 16 Handles jumped on the Snapchat train in January 2013, they asked fans to take a snapchat of themselves at one of its locations. In return, they received a snap with discount code for 16%, 50% or 100% off.

Lynx was the first brand I heard of using Snapchat. They focused of on addressing Snapchat’s reputation for ‘sexting’, as pictures could be ‘risque’, and ‘on those odd occasions where responses were close to the line, responded with an image of the new Deep Space shower gel, urging people to clean up and take a cold shower’.

Clothing retailer, Karmaloop,  has also ventured down the risqué route. They thought this was suitable to their college target audience. Everyday they sent pictures of their new clothing lines, pictures of ‘scantily clad model’s’ and exclusive discount codes. It encouraged fans to post their own videos and images.
Even though it was ‘risque’ and engaged with the ‘sexting’ associated with Snapchat, it attracted more than 2,000 Snapchat friends.

A few alternative ways to use Snapchat include; The NBA created excitement around an event by using behind the scenes clips of Kevin Durant's MVP announcement while GrubHub used Snapchat in a completely different way, they used it find and hire a summer intern.

Latest report from accountancy firm BDO, shows that UK firms are intending to hire staff at the fastest rate for 16 years!

This follows on from news earlier this summer that the UK economy passed pre-recession peak after six years. 

BDO stated that their jobs index for July was at its highest level since 1998. Their jobs index measures hiring plans among firms for three month periods. A 'significant uptick' and an increase in the rate of job creation was behind this rise, which is expected to carry on throughout the rest of the year.

These results also coincided with their optimism index, this measures the expectations of UK firms over a six month period, which were at their highest since over the past 12 months.

Peter Hemington, partner at BDO, stated that "The unprecedented growth we've seen in UK employment this year looks set to continue." However, he went on to explain that some firms are already worried about a lack of suitable candidates, with some firms debating using the "readily available and flexible labour from Europe."

Head over to www.chrysalisrecruitment.com to view all our current vacancies, or contact  0161 8175028 to speak to one of our consultants.

With recent news that HMV is stealing back it's market share in the entertainment industry, rising from it's 10.7% during its administration to its current level of 14.7%. Since being bought out HMV have redesigned store layouts, offered live in-store gigs and overhauled their marketing with a new look website and new loyalty programme. We decided to take a look at other brands that have come back from the brink and how they did it!

Lego - Some brands seem too big to die and that is the category Lego falls into. Lego was a leading toy manufacturer since its creation in 1932, however the turn of the century saw a huge increase in the popularity of electronic toys and video games. By 2004 the company had nearly $1 billion of debt. On the verge of bankruptcy, the global recession actually helped rather then hindered Lego. Sales began to rise due to it's low prices, the company reduced its workforce and halved its produce line to become more profitable. It now stands as the fourth largest toy manufacturer,  enjoyed recent success with its blockbuster movie

Old Spice - Another hugely successful brand, it reached its peak in the 1970s but things turned soured by 1990s as their consumer base had aged. Procter and Gamble bought out Old Spice an completely revamped the brand with series of amazing adverts aimed at a younger generation. These videos went viral and as a result restored Old Spice as the leader of the body wash market. Here's one of our favourite Old Spice ads;


Netflix - Around three years ago, not many people still believed in Netflix and according to a Forbes survey; people thought that blackberry was more likely to survive then Netflix. But thanks to a number of original series they developed, including Orange is the New Black, House of Cards and a revamped Arrested Development, Netflix destroyed all other streaming devices. Its used 10x more than rivals Amazon Instant Video and Hulu. It's originality and the fact it established itself as market leader lead to Netflix being the second best performing company in 2013 by stock price.

Burberry - Burberry's own success was also its biggest killer. Their famous checkered pattern had been associated with chavy Britain and as a result damaged the brand. Their was also a lack of vision and clarity throughout the company which left Burberry in no mans land. Angela Ahrendts came in as CEO in 2006 and created a vision of connecting Burberry back to its roots. Over the next six years, it took factory closures, layoffs, leadership shake-ups, and a re-invention of the brand to make this happen. Burberry has gone from strength to strength and now is one of the most anticipated shows at London Fashion week, with Interbrand recently reporting Burberry as the 77th most valuable brand in the world.

Jessops - Famous british retailer was another high street brand to struggle during the recession. Within 18 months of calling the administrators in and reopening Jessops were announcing £70million profits, an incredible feat. This is partly due to Peter Jones who bought the brand for £5million (with £81 million worth of debt). He described Jessops as ‘a very tired, weary estate of 200 stores, of which over 100 were just not profitable," taking inspiration from Apple he redesigned the stores to be more interactive. This, combined with Jessops knowledgable staff (most of whom are avid photographers themselves) created value-add services which are hard to replicate and something that consumers really value.

With BMW officially signing up to be Medium's first advertiser, the blog publishing platform has been pushed back in to the public eye. But what actually is Medium and how can it benefit you?

From the co-founders of Twitter and Blogger, Medium is a platform for sharing content. We're all aware of the importance of content and Medium believe theres more to it. They are firm believers that words are the most important factor and theres much more to come in how we use them on the web.

Quick round up of all the big marketing appointments during July!

David Lewis, currently global personal care boss at Unilever, will take over as Tesco’s chief executive from Philip Clarke in October. Clarke has paid the price for the supermarket’s poor sales, Lewis now faces the challenge of turning around the supermarket’s recent run of sales declines as well as shifting customer perceptions of the brand and creating a clear brand identity. As a result, Unilever has appointed Alan Jope, who is currently the president of its Russian, African, the Middle East and Turkish business to fill the role left by David Lewis. He will be president of its personal care division. 

After a review of their company structure, Britvic has decided that their top UK marketer Jonathan Gatward will move to a newly created role overseeing development of adult soft drink brands and marketing capability. Britvic are currently recruiting for his replacement as GB marketing director role.

Chief marketing officer of TUI Travel and TUI AG Michael Lambertz is leaving the company “to pursue new professional challenges”. This will be a huge blow to the TUI group as Lambertz has overseen all TUI global brands since 2000. TUI Travel and TUI AG are currently negotiating a merger deal with the outcome likely to affect whether this role will still exist.

Mars has appointed Debra Sandler, president of its American division, as chief health and wellbeing officer role. Its new role that has been developed in response to criticism that Mars are marketing to consumers irresponsibly. Sandler will coordinate the health and wellbeing efforts for brands such as Snickers, Skittles and Uncle Ben’s worldwide

ESI Media, publisher of the Evening Standard and Independent, has appointed the current managing director of Metro Newspapers Steve Auckland as its group CEO. He will take the reins of the media company, which shares the same office building as Metro, from Andrew Mullins, who announced earlier this month he was leaving ESI to join Informa.

L’Oreal has appointed its first CMO for UK and Ireland, with former Diageo marketer Hugh Pile take the role. This is part of a structural “regroup” that will align marketing with elements such as social listening and consumer insight. One of Pile's main tasks will be to support L’Oreal’s growth strategy, which aims to reach 1 billion new consumers by 2020.

Facebook has also appointed a former Diageo marketer; Michelle Klein who was top marketer for their Smirnoff brand. She's been appointed in order to educate advertisers about the platform’s user engagement tools. Klein will focus primarily on managing agency relationships worldwide when she joins the social network. The newly created role is reportedly head of global agency marketing, which Facebook has been looking to fill for the last quarter. It centres on developing scalable marketing programs for advertising agencies to integrate into their global plans for brands.


British Gas has hired its first head of brand marketing in Birds Eye UK’s marketing chief Margaret Jobling. After three and a half years Jobling leaves Birds Eyes to steer brand-building activity for British Gas and its sub brands. She has a team of over 50 marketers and will also work with its digital division on expanding its online and social media presence. 

The ASA has decided to ban Captain Morgan's recent Facebook advert, as it implied that drinking rum cures boredom. Although some of you may agree with that statement, the Youth Alcohol Advertising council took particular offence to it. 

Captain Morgan's recent Facebook advert that was banned by the ASA.

Kronenbourg, part of the Heineken family, used French legend Eric Cantona to promote the "Gallic superiority" of Kronenbourg 1664. Athough a brilliant advert, it focused heavily on the French hops used and how it was produced in the small french town of Alsace, when in reality it was brewed in Manchester and the Steisselspalts hops made up a very small proportion of the four types that were used. This led to the ASA banning the advert for misleading about the true origins of Kronenbourg.

Data Translator

With the current wealth of data available to brands and the huge emphasis placed on analytics it has created a demand for individuals that can connect these 'statistics' to 'decisions'. Without these middle man companies can find themselves overwhelmed with raw data, the 'Data Translator' utilises their strategic understanding to help form ideas and make relevant decisions as oppose to just sharing information.

Mike Bugembe, Cheif Analytics officer at JustGiving, highlights the lack of these candidates who can work with data and also find the “nuggets of gold” to help a companies strategy. “The difficulty is finding one individual who can cover both spectrums,” he added.

Examples: Diageo and JustGiving

What you need: Ability to analyse marketing and other data and then clearly explain to a business what the findings mean. Have a background in analytics combined with a more ‘human’ role, such as school governor.

Digital Media Planner and Buyer

BIA/Kelsey, media advisers, forecast that advertising revenues for social media platforms will reach $17 billion by 2017. Although the demand for app developers is obvious, its the digital media planners which is also seeing huge growth. While the traditional media planner is somewhat a one-person department (or just a name on a list of approved outsource vendors), the digital media planner and buyer might be part of a department in the making.

Examples: iCrossing and Honda

Master Storyteller

Content, Content, Content! One of the buzzwords of the last 18 months, the focus on content as a marketing tool has created a number of roles; one of which is the "Master Storyteller". It is becoming more and more common to see brands trying to immerse their customer in brand stories. The role of the Master Storyteller is to create a consistent story that represents the brand and its values through multiple marketing channels.

Example: Cystic Fibrosis Trust

What you need: Be a great content strategist and know how to execute it across multiple channels. Former journalists who can apply their experience to a business will do well.

Digital All-Rounder

Digital experience is becoming an essential part of all marketing roles now. Although having a specialism is still very important, we're now seeing more brands demanding a general understanding of digital practise as a minimum requirement. This is not surprising when Accenture's recent study forecasted that digital will account for 75% of marketing executives budgets within the next five years.

Martin Riley, CMO of Pernod Ricard, agrees that digital experience and understanding should be integrated into all marketing roles. “As we define the marketing roles of the future, we can take general roles and specialist roles as a basis but we need to encourage specialists to gain a broad understanding of the business and the commercial aspects of what marketing is seeking to achieve overall, and to encourage generalists to gain a deeper understanding and hands-on experience of generating insights, innovation and creativity,” says Riley.

It's been less than a week since Germany were crowned World Champions in Brazil. Can you remember any of the adverts though?!

Preparation

Adidas' 6 month Pre-Planned Campaign 

"We want to be the most talked-about brand at World Cup," says Tom Ramsden, brand marketing director for Adidas Football, who oversees communications across advertising, PR, social and retail. "We knew we were going to do something real-time, that isn't completely brand new to us, but it is at this scale."

"The spin-off would be to be the most talked about in terms of how much traffic you can drive to retail, use of things like the hashtag and everything else," Mr. Ramsden adds. "But that simple goal is what is keeping the train on the tracks."

We Are Social has been flying across the globe to gather content on over 100 Adidas players that can be assembled on the fly regardless of who wins. This information was collected into a "Content Bible" of 1,000 images and 160 videos primed for use in reaction to game play, "It's basically spread betting," Mr. Ramsden added.

Nike's sponsored teams and players had a relatively unsuccessful World Cup performance in comparison to Adidas, but despite this it's World Cup campaign continues to raise the bar in engagement. Their “Risk Everything” campaign, which consists of several videos, have had over 400 million views, and over 23.05 million actual engagements. The brand’s Pixar-styled “The Last Game” animated short  leads the way with around 65 million views.

That Semi Final


It'll be hard to look back on this World Cup without mentioning the collapse on Brazil in their own backyard. It became the most talked about sporting event in the history of twitter racking up an impressive 35.6m tweets mentioning either #BRA or #GER. This smashed the Superbowl's previous record of 24.9 million tweets.


As a result brands took advantage of this opportunity in a variety of ways. From mocking to congratulating, below of some of the stand out responses.



The Suarez Bite

Were brands prepared for this incident or just responding in real time?

McDonald's, Nando's, BetFair, Listerine and Trident all used tongue in cheek adverts on social media and print.



However, it was Adidas's response which stood out. As oppose to jumping on the trend, they dropped Suarez from all World Cup marketing activities. "“Adidas certainly does not condone Luis Suarez’s recent behaviour and we will again be reminding him of the high standards we expect from our players. We have no plan to use Suarez for any additional marketing activities during the 2014 FIFA World Cup.”

Adidas's prominent role as a World Cup sponsor meant they didn't have to use this incident to raise brand awareness like many other brands did. They instead showed a responsible approach and limited long term damage to the brand.

Endorsement

With such a huge event looming and so much potential coverage, brands often associate themselves with potential stars. This can make it even harder to stand out? Yet mischief makers Paddy Power once against went against the grain. They managed to sign up Paul Scholes exclusively to front their World Cup campaign.

They started in October 2013 by asking "who would NEVER work for Paddy Power?".

"The company wanted someone to provide genuine insight to readers in this disruptive media landscape. Somebody who was really exclusive. Somebody who hadn’t done the rounds on the TV sofas" said Paul Mallon, editorial manager for Paddy Power.

"The results of this content deal have been exceptional. In terms of social media, our #AskScholes hashtag was trending organically for more than two hours with more than 30m potential impressions. These things normally get messy on Twitter (and they did with ludicrous questions) but we were confident Scholes’ clever answers would disarm any doubters." Paul added.



Failures

Obviously there was always going to be a couple of fails!