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Are luxury brands more alluring for banner ads? According to ad platform provider Sizmek, they are: luxury brands get much better click through rates (CTR) for rich media and polite banners when compared to benchmark figures.

The study, entitled Luxury Benchmarks 2014, found that for rich media luxury brands had a CTR of 0.36%, compared to 0.22% benchmark, while for polite banners – banners which replace the main image with a featherweight replica during page loading to avoid...

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Feature Video is becoming more and more important to content marketing. More often than not, a quick video pitch will last far longer in the memory than a block of text or a generic press release.

Some companies are doing video very well. Plenty more, though, are making a right pig’s ear of it.

One company which aims to change that is Nideo, a B2B video content platform.

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The largest global firms are rushing to social media, but are hampered by “poor management and disjointed strategies”, according to a study.

The Financial Times Bowen Craggs Index of corporate online effectiveness, which published its eighth edition today, found that Shell, Eni and Nestle run the top three “web estates”. Unilever, Siemens, BP and SAP all made the top 10.

What do...

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Financial services companies are improving their customer experience...

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Lego has released a statement confirming it will not renew its partnership deal with oil firm Shell, after a series of attacks from Greenpeace regarding Shell’s proposed plans to drill for oil in the Arctic.

“Children are our major concern and the central focus of our company,” said Jørgen Vig Knudstorp, CEO of the Lego...

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Apple has been ranked the top global brand for the second year running, according to a report from Interbrand.

The top five brands remains unchanged from the year before, indicating an entrenched ecosystem. Google and Coca-Cola took the silver and bronze medals respectively, while IBM and Microsoft rounded off...

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A report released by Adobe and PageFair has revealed that the use of adblocking software is accelerating rapidly, with some demographics more likely than others to nix the rogue adverts.

2013 saw the number of users who use ad blocker software more than double globally, from 54 million to 121 million. As of June this year, the number stands at approximately 144...

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We’ve all heard the maxim that content is king. For marketing managers with advertising budget to blow, then it’s an important piece of advice, whether you’re creating a banner ad or going native.

More recently however, it’s not...

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Video advertising group Ebuzzing & Teads has rebranded to Teads,...

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Here’s an interesting new mobile app release: Journey HQ is trying to get to the bottom of customer journeys, decision making and buying patterns by getting users to fill in information as they go along.

The USP is simple. Most industry market research never fails to have two ingredients: questions and question-setters. Journey HQ gets rid of both.

Siamack Salari is the creator of Journey HQ, and a long time collaborator on ethnographic testing methods. He firmly believes the...

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Put the word ‘banks’ into Google News, and you get a steady stream of stories. Today’s headlines...

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You are not a product.

Meet Ello. With this declaration of intent this new, hip, invite-only social network has gotten plenty of traction over the past weeks for one key reason: it is fiercely opposed to brand dollars.

"Your social network is owned by advertisers", the firm's manifesto reads. "Every post you share, every friend you make and every link you follow is tracked, recorded and converted into data. Advertisers buy your data so they can show you more ads. You are...

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It’s one of the most popular social media...

Marketing comms provider Omnicom has sealed a deal with cloudy CRM provider Salesforce.com to give Omnicom’s agencies more personalised communications through the ExactTarget Marketing Cloud.

The partnership means companies can ‘connect the dots’ between marketing, sales, communities and customer service, leveraging data from a variety of sources and devices.

“As marketers, you need to be wherever your customers touch your brand,” said Lynn Vojvodich, executive vice president and...

Audio content sharing provider audioBoo has rebranded and changed name to audioBoom, alongside putting together an iOS mobile app which works across all iDevices.

Why the name change? It’s a simple one letter addition, but it works on more than one level. As a piece of audio on the site is – or was – known as a ‘boo’, the company found it difficult getting brands and partners to ask their followers to ‘boo’ them on social media.

Add in the word ‘boom’...

It seems not even a PR disaster involving the latest U2 album can stop Apple. The Cupertino firm has again topped the charts as the coolest brand in Britain, according to the latest study from CoolBrands.

Four of this year’s top five also made that position last year, with Apple ahead of Aston Martin (#2), Nike (#3) and Glastonbury (#5).

Twitter, which came eighth last year, misses out on the top 20 altogether, while Instagram (#14) is a new entry.

“The idea that CoolBrands is about fads and...

Water brand Evian has teamed up with Sanrio, the Mr Men and Little Miss parent company, to create a brand new Mr Man character – ‘Mr Glug’.

“Mr Glug is a very active fellow indeed,” begins the copy. “His favourite sports include water skiing and roller blading.

“All that exercise makes him very thirsty and the thirstier he gets, the more the colour drains out of him,” it continues. “When this happens, Mr Glug must drink water so that his colour comes...

Instagram is in the process of rolling out sponsored content and advertising alongside its regular content to UK users, according to a BBC report.

The adverts, which have already been launched in the US, will aim to be “as natural to Instagram as the photos and videos [users] enjoy from brands who are already using Instagram”, according to a spokesperson.

Unsurprisingly, reaction from the social community has been somewhat negative. Yet the photo-based social...

Musician, entrepreneur and general techie will.i.am has today unveiled his eyewear brand, ill.i Optics, with a promotional video and campaign as part of the launch.

The product, created in conjunction with Australian designer George Gorrow, features a video where will.i.am is sat at a recording desk, yet cuts to various eyewear paraphernalia – will.i.am’s personal collection, spanning 20 years.

“I see a gap in the world of eyewear, and this is my instalment of what I feel is missing,”...

Telecoms provider TalkTalk has unleashed its latest billboard campaign specifically targeting its TV packages – with a more than apparent nod to rivals Virgin Media.

The billboards are being rolled across almost 20 sites in London, including a six sheet banner at Euston Station. The campaign will be seen from Elephant & Castle, Edgware Road, and Waterloo Bridge among others.

This campaign follows ‘The Mission’, a TV campaign “in which five household objects embarked on an odyssey...