EEeeeee! I love new things!

I saw a new TV advert today that stopped me in my tracks. This may not seem blog-worthy on the surface, but it was a jolly good ad. Not only did it contain one of my all-time favourite actors (Kevin Bacon), it introduced me to a brand new brand....EE.

It's not often that a massive super-brand launches in the UK, but when EE did, by golly did it make a splash. Media Week reported that the 4G campaign had cost an estimated £100m and the above-the-line marketing assault dominated newspaper, outdoor advertising and digital. This adds to its existing social media and PR campaigns, and made way for my new favourite TV ad.

So, why is it my favourite? At just over 1 minute 55 seconds it's rather lengthy, so should probably be too long for my twitter-addled goldfish brain attention span. But it isn't. It uses an iconic star, references an iconic game (six degrees of Kevin Bacon. Google it.) and has a great key message - 'EE is the new network for your digital life'. So epic it hurts.

Another stand out aspect of this brand launch, is the way that EE's staff have been brought along in the journey - Marketing Week reported on the internal brand launch where EE declared its staff to be its key marketing asset. They're using gamification techniques and jazzy social platforms to connect their workers to each other, creating a fun and innovative culture. Sounds good to me!

I will continue to watch and wait to see what kind of impact EE has on the crowded marketplace - but congratulate them on a magnificent TV advert that has certainly raised my brand awareness!

The difficulty of complex messages

What on earth is this Higgs Boson thing about? I've watched a video, I've looked it up on Wikipedia, I've read a news article...and I still don't really know. But then again, I'm not a scientist - perhaps I'm not the target market and don't really need to know?

And it made me think about marketing messages - what can you do, as a marketer, if the message you have for your target market, or the product/service you are selling, is really rather complex? Can you sell something if you don't understand it? And if you do understand it, can you develop key messages in a simple way that won't be seen as 'dumbing down'? It can be so difficult to avoid jargon - the language you use internally to talk about what you do and what you sell might not be appropriate or clear externally.

All of this came together for me in a great blog post I saw in The Telegraph, calling for people to attempt to explain Higgs Boson in a tweet. Never before has the 140 character restriction been such a challenge! (Or is this my take on it, because - essentially - I still don't get it?!)

Judging the book industry by the covers

Everyone in my office is reading it. All of my friends are reading it. Many of my friends' mothers are reading it. Yes, you guessed it - Fifty Shades of Grey. It's the first book to sell more than a million copies on Kindle and is the fastest selling paperback since records began. I'm not here to discuss the contents of the book - or the observation by some that it's not very well written - but the marketing of it (of course!)

Jon Wood, deputy publisher at Orion, said: "No one saw this coming. The world has changed. The book market does that. No one really saw Stieg Larsson coming. No one saw Dan Brown coming either. That’s the beauty of this industry. I don’t know if it’s here to stay but the scale of sales would imply that this will last at least a little bit of time"

This makes me wonder - why is the world of publishing so reactive? How come no one saw all these amazing books coming? Surely it's the job of marketing to keep their fingers on the pulse of public opinion and taste, to try and predict the trends in order to preempt the wishes of the consumer? I heard that Fifty Shades began life as a twilight fan blog, which gained popularity and just exploded.

And now, of course, the bandwagon is a-rollin'. Publishers are rooting around their back catalogue to see what they have that could fit this trend, to try and piggy back the so-called 'mummy porn' genre (I hate that expression with a passion. A burning passion. Even worse than 'chick lit'!) The worst offender I've heard of, is Mills and Boon releasing a series of books called '12 shades of surrender'. Seriously?!! This amounts, in my eyes, to Ambush Marketing - and I'm not a fan. It pangs of a lack of creativity and laziness really.

So I guess my question is - where next? Is the book market so massively consumer led and unpredictable? Where will ePublishing take the industry in, say, 3 years? A fascinating and exciting landscape - would love to hear your thoughts!

The future is mobile

Some great google-y stats that I got from a recent issue of Marketing Magazine. All stats are from Sarah Speake, Strategic marketing director, Google UK & Ireland…

In the UK, 93% of consumers use their mobile devises to access the web on a daily basis, whether for searching, shopping, engaging across social media platforms, accessing content or playing games.

Already, 22% of UK smartphone owners admit that they intentionally have their mobile with them to compare prices and to get product information, and 16% claim they have changed their mind about purchasing something in-store as a result of information they gathered on their smartphone.

Phew! Hard stats are great, aren’t they? Although I’m surprised at the 16% - I would have thought it would have been more? I guess it will only increase as more and more organisations create mobile friendly sites.

I have to admit I’m one of the 7% who don’t access mobile internet daily – but only because my old phone never has enough battery to let me! Looking forward to my upgrade in the near future!

But it’s information like this that excites me about working in marketing – the future, and possibilities, of mobile marketing are immense. Gamification really interests me, as does augmented reality. I went to a CIM Social Media Bootcamp last year that really opened my eyes to it, showing us the video of iButterflies - it literally blew my mind! It makes me wonder how much of the marketing we're doing today (including direct marketing via the UK postal system!!) we'll be doing in 5-10 years? Will all future enthusiastic marketers need to be techy experts, creating HTML code and mobile aps on a daily basis? Exciting times are ahead...

Going viral

New video content is exciting – creating it feels great – but the expectations of those not involved in video creation can be overwhelming. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard ‘Let’s make this go viral!’ and (the ever-so-slightly accusatory) ‘This should easily get thousands of hits on YouTube!’

Let’s start with this – you cannot MAKE something go viral (I could easily swap the word ‘make’ for ‘force’ or ‘push' in this context, as that’s what people really mean), you can only create compelling video material and present it to the world. The whole point is that people want to share it – the power is with the consumer, which must wrangle the any traditionalists out there. Yes, you heard me correctly, there's been a massive shift of power since the advent of social, and the people have strong and diverse opinions, so us marketers all must work harder.

This makes me think about the success of the Kony2012 campaign in March this year. There are many blogs and articles claiming to share the ‘secret’ of its viral success – just 3 days after its release, more that 70m people had viewed or seen parts of the video – and I’ve tried to round up some sensible information (if only for my own use/sanity!)

This blog post is a great, in-depth (if lengthy!) analysis. My key points from it are about grabbing attention, making sure your video is high quality and to make it SIMPLE. My ultimate favourite point is to ‘measure what you find valuable’ – which in this case is awareness. A difficult task, but if done right is magic!

An opinion piece in Marketingweek emphasised another brilliant aspect of Kony2012 – the dying art of storytelling. The Kony2012 video is quite long for this digital age – 30 minutes – but is captivating and engaging, holding the viewers attention throughout.

A blog post in Marketing Mag talks about the value of listening - Kony2012 was highly criticised as a marketing ploy, with the company's financials heavily questioned. A reply from the organisation was speedily published - emphasising that if you're going to use social platforms, you need to listen and respond to people, whether the feedback is good or bad!

Hopefully these tips can help you, and me, when tasked with video creation!

(I wont go further into the Kony2012 campaign. I hear the second video hardly got any hits and the Cover the Night campaign was a washout. They talk of slacktivism, and the difficulty of conversion from a video to action... All I know is that I watched the first video, but didn't actually do anything.)

50 signs you're an adult

I saw a great piece of PR-able content from an unlikely source today – Skipton Building Society. They asked 2000 people to rank the things that ‘make you a grown up’. As anyone who knows me will know – I am obsessed with this. What is a ‘grown up’ and how do you know that you are one? Skipton will tell me!

Listing 50 things (I tick 24 of the boxes…what does that mean?!) that make you a fully-fledged adult is a very fun piece of content, with a great sales message for Skipton – having a mortgage, pension, insurance and a savings account all ranked highly.

I stumbled across this when browsing my guilty pleasure news website (here) but also found it on The Telegraph’s website. Having a quick search on Twitter, I caught a few tweets (mainly retweeting The Telegraph) but was disappointed to see that Skipton’s own twitter account hadn’t mentioned it (or been used for 7 days…) I know my friends would have loved this – establishing a hashtag and pushing this content via social media would have generated far more interactions, far more interest and (ultimately) far more sales! I was also confused that the Daily Mail had an infographic for the research (MASSIVE fan of infographics!) but I couldn’t find it anywhere else? Again, had Skipton fully utilised this great infographic, using some engaging and exciting tweets (How ‘adult’ are you? What makes a grown-up?) I’m sure this could have spread wider.

And sending out a press release on a Friday?! Big mistake in my book.

PS – surprised to see that the signs I harp on about – owning a pet and having National Trust membership – seem to be missing!

Costa vs Starbucks

I love coffee. I've only really discovered it in the last few years, but boy! I had been missing out until then! I also love great marketing, so combining the two is just heavenly. So this brings me to a great debate, one close to my heart. Costa vs Starbucks.

As a consumer I love Costa. I love the taste of their skinny lattes, have a Costa Coffee Club card, there's a branch very close to my work, and I will seek one out for my afternoon perk on a Saturday shopping trip. However, as a marketer, they make me want to cry. Their website has got better recently (I quite like their 'See how we make it' videos - very English and rural and natural) but their e-marketing leaves a lot to be desired. Clicking through to a double-points scheme (which they regularly do) and the landing page is dire, the email itself - which had a useful points update - was dire. AND to top it all off, they're not big on social. Their facebook page is hit and miss (one post recently was about the top 10 holiday destinations! How does that bring me closer to the brand?!) and they missed the boat with twitter, with no centralised twitter account for the organisation and now all the twitter names have gone. They have such a warm tone of voice in their printed marketing materials, it would be great to see them more vocal via a social channel. So many times I've tweeted about sitting in a nice warm Costa shop with my favourite drink, as have many thousands of others, but all to deaf ears. I'm showing you spontaneous brand love (which money can't buy!) and you can't even interact with me!

Starbucks, on the other hand, is so digital it hurts. They have an active facebook page per country. I read in Marketing magazine that 'Starbucks has a dedicated social-media team in-house, whose job it is to have meaningful conversations with consumers.' And it's true! Their UK twitter feed is amazing, so interactive and chatty, with RTs and replies all over the shop. Their most recent campaign, pushing their stronger tasting lattes whilst emphasising the importance of personalisation, saw them giving away free lattes for one morning in March - but instead of 'latte' written on your takeaway cup, the barista asked for your name. Their 60 second TV advert the day before the promotion was brilliant. I'm not ashamed to say that I immediately tweeted (with the fully established hashtag) and joined the queue in the morning*.  And, to be fair, I'm not the biggest fan of their coffee.

So there we have it. Head or heart? Starbucks or Costa? I think this fight will continue for a while yet - I just hope that Costa, 'the nation's favourite coffee shop', finally jumps into the social ring to battle it out.


* I'll ignore that the barista spelt my name wrong. It's the thought that counts