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! 

 

Raymond Kurzweil is the man who accurately predicted the structure of the brain over 50 years ago. We could fill this entire site with pretty outlandish things he's said - the fact he might live forever would be near the top. Despite a scarcity of evidence, he was proved right about the brain. Now he says by 2030, through ingested nanobots, our brains will be connected to the immense processing power of the cloud and that humanity will see the largest growth in intelligence since 65 million years ago when mammals grew their neocortexes and realigned the course of evolution (spoiler alert: the dinosaurs were the wrong answer).



A truly, literally, mind-blowing video.



... incidentally, Raymond Kurzweil is now Google's Director of Engineering. So it's probably as likely as cars driving themselves, a computer beating the top contestants at natural language based game-shows and telepathic control.

Last week we took a look at how YouTube manages to court its hyper-active quirky userbase while still operating with the sheen and slickness of the media monolith it is - this week we're presented with another example of just how it does it.

YouTube seals deal with The Music Vault to bring 12,000+ rare live concert performances to the video platform. It follows the blueprint for the nature of deals YouTube has made in growing to the enormous scale it has - enticing and exciting content on a personal level for highly-engaged niche audiences that offers new opportunities for engagement with large brands.


Being Manchester based digital recruitment specialists we know a thing or two about music - as you should hailing from the city that gave the world Joy Division, Oasis, The Smiths, The Chemical Brothers and, er, Bez.

The huge collection spans decades:









Music Vault have even made helpful playlists to introduce people to the daunting amount of videos - such as '5-face melting guitar solos' and has separated out the bands with the most videos into their own channels.

So if you're tense and nervous, and you can't relax... fire up Music Vault and get lost in the classics. Just don't expect any Radiohead.

You might want to get comfortable for this one...

It's Independence Day! In America, anyway. So what better day to take a look at the freedom and liberty afforded to us on the internet and on all manner of digital devices?


The launch is imminent for the world's most privacy-centered phone ever, the Blackphone, and it's already sold out. A collaboration of two suitably named companies, privacy-centric Silent Circle and geeky phone makers - Geeksphone, the Blackphone opens up all new discussions about the level of privacy and control a user should be able to enjoy on their phone. Tested extensively by Ars Technica, the Blackphone isn't doing all the data-skimming, data-spewing of your average phone. Predictably it doesn't come with the same ecosystem as your average phone either and if you're fond of Apple Store or Google Play Store then you're unlikely to be under your own security lockdown any time soon. It seems to reinforce the point that privacy and personalisation of data and experience are increasingly a trade-off. It's probably a bit OTT for consumer consumption but for anyone with sensitive information the Blackphone could be a tremendously important development.

Meanwhile on the 'free' internet - you may have read about Facebook conducting emotion-altering experiments on over 600,000 of their users. Well that's not the only one, with the WSJ suggesting there's actually been hundreds of experiments. Anyone seeking anonymity could previously turn to Tor, the software to anonymize your journey on the internet, but that's now a target for the NSA to monitor, in the ultimate case of being guilty by association. It's no surprise that privacy is becoming a pricey commodity with the internet-monitoring authorities increasingly seeing seeking anonymity as the same thing as having something to hide (not that those two things never cross over).


The NSA suffered a privacy problem of their own when activists flew a massive balloon over their now less-than-secret data centre. But they did score a pretty major victory when a panel ruled that their social network surveillance programme, PRISM, is alright really and definitely not illegal. There's hope though, as the majority of respondents in the latest Pew survey believe the internet will largely be free (and relatively similar to today's) come 2025.

When YouTube was hailed as "The New Hollywood" it seemed as though the golden age of online video had arrived. Ordinary people were becoming stars, video was being democratized, from retro to cult to niche if ever there was a place where content was king it was the kingdom of YouTube.




While discussion of the "Greatest TV Drama Ever" can range from Breaking Bad to The Wire or from The Wire to Breaking Bad, YouTube offers literally millions of videos and each user likely has their own favourites.

Of course the ludicrous freedom and variety was supported by a sophisticated and successful revenue model, with ad placement making YouTube its earnings. A figure of likely $5.6 billion in 2013, which is not too shabby. YouTube hit upon an irresistible offer for content creators, the chance to take home 55% of the profits from advertising around their videos, while YouTube takes a 45% cut. That's 55% of something (and potentially a lot) or 100% of nothing. It's an easy choice, one that made likes of PewDiePie millions of ad dollars for playing games and just generally putting himself on display.

Now YouTube seeks to offer premium models to diversify the experience and take some profit from the growing revenues of streaming services for both video and music. With many major labels comfortably tied into deals with YouTube already through publishing companies like music-only Vevo, smaller independent labels are fighting tooth and nail with YouTube claiming the terms they're being offered are unfair. YouTube's wielding its power by threatening to remove the videos from these labels already on the services. While one could argue YouTube is bullying the 'little guy' it's also fair to point out being able to have your wares in the shopfront that is YouTube has been a massive advantage for the labels.

The effects of YouTube go far beyond making some people very rich though, as exemplified by one lawsuit filed by Ghyslain Raza who claimed the sharing of his video had 'ruined his life'. Not a name you recognise? You may know him as Star Wars kid. Appropriately he's now a law school graduate - specialising in cyber bullying.



From an often bizarre mishmash of poorly executed oddities YouTube has grown to be possibly the most dominant force in video on the planet, which is remarkable seeing as it was only started in 2005. Simply if you want a video online, overwhelmingly you go to YouTube (unless you're artsy enough to use Vimeo). Now it'll even support HD 60fps, offering Blu-Ray level quality from a little box on your browser. More than that though YouTube can wield the monolithic power of a media giant, decreeing what will and will not be happening (or seen) in online video - perhaps even video in general. Much like Google, YouTube has gone from being a relatively passive curator to an active director of content, making rules and distinctions and sub-levels as it goes.



An odd sandpit where the likes of Billy in his bedroom with some pirated animation software and the cheapest midi keyboard he could find on Ebay can outdo Michael Bay and a billion dollars of exploding this and that. YouTube has the challenge to find a balance between its impeccably slick, media-dominating money-making aspirations and the interests and preferences of possibly most engaged large community on the web.

But with Google at the helm, who've shown an adeptness at growing huge and all-powerful while still remaining relatively well liked, YouTube stands a decent chance of juggling all those balls at once - if taking the odd swipe at some of the pillars of traditional media along the way. As long as it does there'll be a fair few more hits the like of "Leave Britney Alone" and "Nyan Cat" yet.