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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There's been much debate as to what Apple plans to do with social media analytics firm Topsy, but it's clear that having spent $200 million recently acquiring it, that it will play an important role in future developments. Companies such as Topsy, and a number of other start ups that are growing at a rapid rate, are trying to make sense of the everyday interactions that take place across a number of social platforms. This information allows brands to monitor campaigns, to see what is working and what isn't. Social data is taking consumer profiling to the next level; seeing what users pin, like, retweet, their interactions and feedback.

As we entered 2014 many people have predicted real time marketing to play a big role this year. Already we've seen a number of high profile events that have resulted in a number of examples of real time marketing. This highlights what an important component RT marketing has become to top brands, as clearly they look incorporate it into their marketing strategies.

There was no slowing Carat down last year, they followed up a very successful year with a huge 2013. Ad Age chose Carat as the Media Agency of the Year because of their ability to kick on, they increased revenue by 20% and recruited top talent 2013, while still securing new accounts and managing their huge General Motors account.

Carat Global President Doug Ray said: "After winning so much business last year we could have gotten distracted by trying to absorb the business and being too internally focused, the goal was to avoid distraction by hiring and "scaling operations."

Nielsen's Adview Pulse report released it's latest findings yesterday on the state advertising in 2013. Internet was the big winner with a 32% rise in spending in the first three quarters of the year compared to 2012. 

Media investment giant GroupM has predicted that UK mobile advertising expenditure is set to rocket in 2014, encompassing one quarter of total ad-spend and one fifth of paid search.

 Chrysalis'client Maplin, the electrical retailer, has announced the appointment of agency WAA to handle their marketing and advertising account.

After a successful debut in the U.S market, internet giant Google, in partnership with Sony, will launch their new television product in Britain towards the end of July.