(c)Volvo Cars UK

We all know TV ads are a common kind of marketing for high-end car companies, but Volvo has taken it one step further with its very own series of three short films. 

Human Made Stories premiered on Sky Atlantic this month to mark Volvo's new 90 series range of cars. It focuses around "people who do things differently, challenge conventions and create their own path," such as:

• Oliver Armitage, an innovative engineer whose lifelong pursuit is making human and machine work together seamlessly. Along with his team from Cambridge, Oliver works with...

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So we know digital entertainment expo and conference ChinaJoy was a few weeks ago now, but it's not very often you get an exclusive live-diary peek inside the event from a UK perspective. 

Richard Downey, new global business director, mobile, at The Specialist Works, was there for the four days and wrote this very open blog about his experience.

Read on to find out more about his Shanghai adventures:

Wednesday 27 July

After a day spent battling the combined effects of...

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Reviews, evidence, references. People increasingly expect to do business based on trustworthy proof of prior success.

So why do so many professional services organisations and marketers struggle to produce compelling, timely case studies?

It doesn’t matter whether you call them case studies, client stories or credentials, it all looks easy on paper.

In an ideal scenario, you deliver some great work. You write up the challenge, how you solved it and the positive impact that you...

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Unless you've been hiding under a rock - or not in the UK - you'll have heard that Theresa May has now stepped into the role of Prime Minister at Number 10. 

But what you may not have known is that Prime Minister May is a liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Marketors. According to the City livery company that promotes marketing as a force for good, the Rt Hon Theresa May MP (her proper title) has been a member for the past 17 years.

Other Prime Ministers - such as Sir Winston Churchill...

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All marketers love a good case study, it's a simple fact. Why? Because there's no more powerful way of getting the word of a brand across than its own customers. 

This is the simple reason influencer marketing and consumer reviews are really taking off these days, but there's no underestimating the power of a good old fashioned case study.

One new tool on the market to help businesses and brands build client and customer stories

(c)iStock.com/Bastian Slabbers

Bernie Sanders’ election campaign team is pulling off a rather original email on-boarding strategy. The way his team used email at the start of his ongoing presidential candidate race proved to be unsuccessful, when asking volunteers to make phone calls to gather support for Bernie. We’ll call this a ‘big request’ for the sake of this article

But when Bernie's team of volunteers were asked instead for a 'small request', which was to gather at a local...

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Marketers need to make more use of online video resources such as YouTube, whose ROI is rising compared to TV, according to new research.

In a meta analysis of 56 case studies across eight countries it was found that YouTube delivered a higher return on investment than TV in more than three-quarters (77%) of cases. The research was carried out with a range of partners that included BrandScience, Data2Decisions, GfK, Kantar Worldpanel, MarketingScan and MarketShare.

Lucien van der...

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Italian restaurant chain Zizzi has embraced the concept of gamification for the second year running to deliver a new loyalty and promotional campaign that allowed customers to compete for food and holiday prizes and the chain to radically increase its marketing database. The campaign attracted 22,000 new customer names to the brand.

Zizzi ran an eight-week online board game promotion in association with 3radical Voco, which users could access through a mobile optimised website and on...

Picture credit: Jack Morton

Mobile World Congress (MWC) can be a strange and inhospitable environment for the uninitiated, with its cavernous aircraft hangers, huge crowds, and endless aisles of things to see. It’s also a huge challenge for the companies that attend: everyone is competing for attention, and there’s only so much of it to go around. 

For brands, the secret of success is to resist the temptation to just talk about their products, and to instead seize the opportunity to...

(c)iStock.com/MACIEJ NOSKOWSKI

In the ‘mad men’ days of marketing and advertising, you would typically reach the traveller through billboards, press or television ads placed at very strategic locations or times - outdoor billboards featuring warm and exotic holidays to Marrakech or Turkey tactically placed near snow-covered airports in Glasgow.

The fundamental concept of marketing – to be where your customers are – still applies, but the difference today is the access to data and...