Manchester United: Brand lessons from Ferguson’s global tribe

With the departure of Sir Alex Ferguson at the end of this football season, Manchester United Football Club will lose their leader, their spokesman and their talisman of almost 27 years.

What Ferguson did brilliantly at Man U was to internalise, and eventually come to represent, the core values buried deep in the club’s DNA. The resulting energy and passion that increasingly radiated out from the core of the club over the past 27 years has played a key role in the creation of...

16 May 2013 | Advertising Technology

KLM: The 3 pillars of successful social media strategy – #SMWF

KLM has been known as a social media savvy airline for some time, and we managed to pin down its social media manager Karlijn Vogel-Meijer, ahead of her appearance at #SMWF in London later this month, to get some advice and insight.

KLM has done some impressive stuff with social media in the past. Some may recall its scheme to allow people to choose who they would sit next to on a flight via Linkedin profiles, or the “Surprise” random acts of kindness campaign, see video...

7 March 2013 | Campaigns

How to hire the right marketing agency: The integrated vs. specialist debate

The integrated Vs specialist marketing agency conundrum has been around for longer than many of us can remember; but what do the various pros and cons tell us about how this ever-changing discussion should influence marketers’ agency procurement decisions?

The argument is this; should brand marketers hire a large integrated marketing agency; a diverse team with bulging toolkits, the experience to provide joined-up, carefully aligned solutions, devised with a full 360 view of...

22 February 2013 | Social Media Marketing

How long does it take to build an app? [infographic]

How long does it actually take to build an app? In a bid to come up with an answer to this question, Kivney polled 100 developers to discover how long they expected it would take to build core front- and backend components of an Android or iOS app.

The backend-as-a-service provider collated the reaults and came up with some surprising visualisations to put the timeframes in context. Who knew you could drill three 3000-foot oil wells in the time it takes to launch the first...

10 January 2013

Global mobile ad impression report shows two horse race

Apple and Samsung are locked in a two horse race to dominate the smartphone advertising market, with nine of the top ten devices in terms of mobile ad impressions attributed to the two manufacturers.

Adfonic, which serves over 100 billion global ad impressions a month, drew the data from its global ad network, and claims in its latest Global AdMetrics report that both firms increased their market share over Q3.

Apple and Samsung devices accounted for nine of the top ten by...

19 November 2012 | Advertising

Email marketing: Why do female senders perform better than males?

Not only do women have neater handwriting than their male colleagues, new research suggests that automated email campaigns perform significantly better when the sender is female, according to a study involving over 13 million email recipients.

The report, from CleverTouch marketing, showed that, on average, emails sent from women achieved an 18% click through, as opposed to just 10% where the sender was a man. Emails sent from a generic address achieved even better results, averaging...

11 October 2012 | Advertising

Location marketing: Boosting mindshare as well as footfall – #AppsWorld

With smartphone penetration edging 50% in the UK and the US, marketers are spending an increasing amount of time thinking about how to harness the relevance and immediacy these devices allow, by reaching out to peoples at the right time and, crucially, in the right location.

Ahead of his October appearance at Apps World in London, MarketingTech checked in with Omid Ashtari, director of business development at Foursquare, one of the leading location-based platforms for marketers, with...

18 September 2012

Google supercharges social ads with Wildfire acquisition

Can Google set the world of social media marketing alight with its latest acquisition?

Google has acquired Wildfire Interactive, the New Zealand-based Web2.0 marketing startup, adding a much needed social element to the search giant’s digital advertising arsenal.

Wildfire employs around 400 people, running ads for at least 30 of the top 50 brands. It was acquired for a reported $350m.

The company’s marketing software allows brands to serve social...

2 August 2012 | Data-driven marketing

Opera: Rich media and iOS most lucrative for mobile advertising

Rich media mobile advertising has seen a rapid increase in popularity among marketers over the last six months, according to a new industry report from Opera Software.

Opera, probably most well known for its virtually ubiquitous mobile browsing services, had made a quiet splash in the mobile advertising space after paying out around $100m on a series of acquisitions like Mobile Theory, AdMarvela and 4th Screen Adverising.

The firm now claims to have dished out over $240m to...

20 July 2012 | Advertising

How to increase Facebook reach by targeting friends of fans

Brands can significantly increase their reach on Facebook by effectively targeting the friends of their fans, according to a European study from Comscore.

The report found that  the majority of European Facebook users’ time is spent scanning their Timeline page. This isn’t surprising in itself, and tallies with a recent similar study into the habits of US Facebook users, but what does it tell us about how brands can interact with their fans and, perhaps more...

19 July 2012 | Data-driven marketing