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Facebook is expected to report a 40% year-on-year sales lift tomorrow for the first three months of 2013, fuelled by its fast developing mobile advertising revenues.

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Online advertising has never been more effective for brands, and now the final barriers to reaching vast online audiences have finally been removed. 

Brands want specific online engagement with consumers, so they need a very specific analysis of consumer habits on the web when planning and executing online display advertising. Read More »

Sir Martin Sorrell, the WPP Group chief executive, and Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook co-founder, are represented as the two faces of media this week – that’s old media and new media – in terms of executive pay.

Zuckerberg has cut his pay to the notional amount of $1 (64p) and in so doing, joins an exclusive club of chief executives who have made similar moves.

Sorrell on the other hand, who has long been dogged by rows about his salary with shareholders, agreed to cut his pay by £100,000 to £1.2m. Read More »

It’s something of a contentious point these days, but digital creative agencies are still, primarily, purveyors of truth.

It may often be dressed up in words like ‘engagement’, ‘shareable’ and ‘social’, but the strongest of their creative ideas still have a solid truism at the core.

So it’s interesting to consider the quote of Isaac Newton, one of history’s greatest original thinkers, that ‘Truth is the offspring of silence and unbroken meditation‘.

Hmm.

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Some people don’t like what we do. They don’t like the fact that they’ll browse Topshop’s new season of shoes, and then see them advertised temptingly within a click’s reach across the next few days.

They don’t like seeing the holidays they’ve researched on a whim, parading across banners and MPUs. They find it ‘spooky’.

Or perhaps it’s the fact that they’re seeing adverts for products or services they actually want that makes them uncomfortable. After, all, we’ve spent so long trying to tune out all those irrelevant ads touting stuff we don’t want, haven’t we? Read More »

At advertising conferences you often hear people saying things like “Back in the day, consumers were considered eyeballs with wallets” – like passive captives unable to look away, imbibing messaging and responding as intended.

A bit odd (and amusing) to think of consumers of yore as such pliable, complacent beings. More likely that they were a lot more forgiving of messaging because there wasn’t quite so much of it around. Read More »

According to IAB UK, online ad spend in the UK grew by over 12 percent in the first half of 2012. While the market is unquestionably exploding, understanding of how it actually works can at best be described as evolving at a snail’s pace. This disconnect has its reasons – but also repercussions, especially when it comes to measuring how display ads online impact something as seemingly nebulous as brand awareness.

With established channels like TV and print, advertisers have long grasped the difference between a growth in brand awareness and an increase in immediate response. But in the digital world, that lesson has apparently yet to be learned. Read More »

Business intelligence agency CACI have updated their Acorn product, which uses data such as lifestyle surveys and public sector information to put every UK household into one of 62 demographic categories.

It says that “Acorn is used to understand consumers’ lifestyle, behaviour and attitudes” as well as “to analyse customers, identify profitable prospects, evaluate local markets and focus on the specific needs of each catchment and neighbourhood.”

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Education, inspiration, connection, innovation and celebration. That is what I was told to expect when Advertising Week Europe (AWE) started on Monday and I must admit they pretty much kept to their word. There were a few things that stood out to me throughout the week most notably how we are on a slow move to Web 3.0 and the death of the TVC and rise of the six seconds of story telling. Read More »

The belief of WPP’s chief executive Martin Sorrell that Twitter is more a PR medium for brands, rather than an advertising opportunity, has been widely shot down by rival agencies and social media practitioners.

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