Home  |  About Us  |  Contact  |  Social Media  |  News  |  Create  |  Develop  |  Refine  |  Protect  |  Invest  |  
The Total Image Group   ...Business Alchemists

A regularly updated resource of information and news items.

Archive for the ‘Advertising’ Category

Sweet outlook for advertising future?

Posted Thursday, December 30th, 2010

As industry recovers from the financial crisis executives are easing some of their cutbacks, and it looks like advertising is one of the areas they are prioritising for a budget increase.

Guy Hayward, Chief Executive of JWT UK says he believes clients are beginning to re-use advertising to build their business.

Life’s a lot sweeter for ad land giant Rowntrees- check out the video

According to media investment manager Group M, the UK’s adspend surged by 8% over the past year, with television advertising rising at an even faster pace.


Business Blogging Tips – The Art Of Subliminal Advertising

Posted Friday, November 26th, 2010

Business blogging isn’t much tuned to the practice of blogging, as it is to the art of subliminal advertising. These are tips to better the advertising layered intricately within every single post on a business blog.

Any business only maintains a blog for lead generation and boasting brand image. There are no two ways about – even the Google blog attempted to sooth over concerns of net neutrality to maintain their “do no evil” image. Impressions don’t matter, the number of comments doesn’t matter – all that this blog (and company) is concerned with is to get across it’s message to the right people as best as possible. Think of it like Inception – the purpose is to plan an idea and watch it mature. Establishing that, let’s get down to…

Business Blogging Tips To Get Your Message Across
Create Content About Business, Rather Than YOUR Business
Create posts about your industry, its best practices, guidelines for new entrants, the trends it follows – basically, write about the everything relevant in your industry. The idea is to become somewhat of a inspiration and/or a guru to people in your industry. Let them know how things are done, while remembering that you’re doing so merely to establish two important facts: you know the business and your business knows the industry it belongs in comparatively well.

Referring a specific brand too often causes readers to read between some very thin lines, and realize the intentions of a business blog. Allow them to gain knowledge, insights and exposure, but do NOT expose them to the brand behind the blog. That’s a connection you want them to make on their own.

Make A ‘Somebody’ Write Your Business Blog
This is an important one, and it continues to surprise me how many businesses continue to get it wrong – the blog needs a blogger, an identity. Your blog needs a face. I went through the top 25 results on Google for “business blogging”, and it’s amazing to see all of them resonate with a lack of online identity. Understand this – every business needs a face. Everything from the logo and font on your business card, to the architecture of your office(s), is part of that. To forget that essential attribute of brand image building is (at least to me) sacrilege.

Understanding Blogging – Regular Posts Are Essential
I’ll make this business blogging tips short – if you don’t make regular posts, comments and additions to a blog (any blog), it will fail. Without regular posts, expect not to get any of the following:

RSS subscribers
Followers’ on Facebook, Twitter, Buzz, etc.
Consistent visitors + Free word-of-mouth advertising.


ITV to charge £250,000 for X-Factor final ads

Posted Friday, November 12th, 2010

 ITV could rake in more than £25 million in ad revenue from the final weekend of The X Factor, with media agencies claiming that 30-second spots are being priced at up to £250,000.
Although ITV has not yet confirmed how the show will be scheduled, it is expected that it will run two two-hour long shows, on 11 and 12 December, to decide the winner of this year’s contest.

With viewing figures up on last year agencies are expecting the final to at least perform in line with last year; 12.8 million on Saturday 12 and 15.6 million on Sunday 13 December.

ITV is quoting a 50 per cent premium on its usual station price with further charges for those advertisers wanting to buy either the first or last position in a break.

While The X Factor is being sold as a “special”, prices will vary with some advertisers paying less depending on their agency’s deal with ITV.
 
Advertisers understood to be in talks with ITV about appearing include Microsoft, BSkyB, Pizza Hut and Hallmark.


Leaked Google Documents Reveal How Much Big Brands Spend on Search Ads

Posted Wednesday, September 8th, 2010

Ad Age has obtained an internal Google document that highlights some of the biggest AdWords buyers for the month of June 2010, offering insight into how big brands are using Google and how much they are spending.

Mashable, 8th September 2010

According to the documents, the biggest buyers of AdWords in June included AT&T Mobility, Amazon, eBay and BP. Although most of those companies are frequent big Google spenders, BP was a newcomer to the list, spending $3.59 million on search ads in the wake of the gulf oil spill (compared to just $57,000 in the two months prior).

Top Spenders

The top spender in June, AT&T Mobility, spent $8.08 million on search ads to coincide with the release of the iPhone 4. According to Ad Age, AT&T’s the third-largest U.S. advertiser overall, so its Google spending is not a big surprise.

Other companies that made up the top 10 include:

Apollo Group – You know them as The University of Phoenix and they spent $6.67 million in June 2010
Expedia – $5.95 million
Amazon – $5.85 million
eBay – $4.25 million
Hotels.com – $3.30 million
JC Penney – $2.46 million — we’ll admit, this one surprises us
Living Social – $2.29 million
ADT Security – $2.19 million

Why Brands Buy Google Ads

The data shows us that for big brands, a heavy investment in Google is usually tied to revenue that comes directly from search traffic (as in the case of Amazon, eBay, Expedia, Hotels.com) or in instances where companies are trying to build awareness (AT&T) or weather a PR crisis (BP).

It’s also interesting to note some of the brands that aren’t on the list. The documents obtained by Ad Age indicate that companies like GM, Disney and BMW spent less than $500,000 on Google ads in June. Even Apple spent just less than $1 million on Google ads, despite its high-profile launch of the iPhone 4.

However, we also think it is possible that some big brands are spending money on search, but not directly with Google. For instance, although Ad Age cites Walt Disney as one of the companies that spent less than $500,000 on Google ads in June, the movie studio released Toy Story 3 that month, a film supported by a massive ad campaign. The film has gone on to gross more than $1 billion worldwide, making it one of the most successful animated films of all-time. It seems odd that Disney would spend only $500,000 on search terms for its big summer release.

What seems more likely, however, is that Disney purchased advertising through companies like Fandango or MovieTickets.com and those companies have their own arrangements with Google. In other words, when it comes to evaluating search spending, don’t count out the potential middle men.

This also makes sense when taking a big-picture approach to Google’s own revenue. The top 10 brands only accounted for 5% of U.S. revenues for the month.

Google is a big target for advertisers because of its strength in search and because of its ubiquity across devices. We do wonder if ad buys will shift to other outlets, like say, Facebook, as users spend more and more time on those networks.


Imaginative YouTube ad from Tipp-ex

Posted Friday, September 3rd, 2010

Follow the link and have some fun!

Tipp-ex YouTube ad


Advertisers to Spend $1.7 Billion on Social Networks in 2010

Posted Wednesday, August 18th, 2010

Mashable, 17th August 2010

The latest numbers from eMarketer project that advertisers will spend nearly $1.7 billion in the U.S. on social networking sites in 2010. Worldwide, spending will hit $3.3 billion according to the report.

The numbers represent a significant bump up from estimates published by the research firm at the end of last year, when it projected $1.3 billion would be spent on the space in the U.S.

Not surprisingly, eMarketer sees about half of that money (in the U.S.) going to Facebook, with MySpace continuing to see a smaller share of the pie. Separately, the firm estimated that Facebook’s 2010 revenue would hit $1.2 billion in a report published last week.

Earlier this month, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg said that some of the social network’s biggest advertisers had boosted ad spending by 10x this year; a trend that’s apparent in the eMarketer report.

Check the site for chart: http://mashable.com/2010/08/16/social-networking-ad-spend-2010/


Qantas the most searched for brand of the World Cup

Posted Thursday, July 8th, 2010

The most searched for World Cup brand is Qantas and others in the travel or fashion industry, however a report out July 7 by Marketing Week shows that World Cup sponsors fail to engage the public while Wimbledon boosts brand searches.

The Independent, 8th July 2010
Most of the official World Cup sponsors are failing to engage the public according to a report on July 7 by industry magazine Marketing Week.

During the week June 26-Jul 3, apart from car manufacturer Kia, all the other official sponsors of the World Cup have seen a decline in internet searches for their product, despite the high visibility of their logos at every game. The report states that rather than official sponsors the most popular searches are for individual brands sponsoring teams.

Between the week ending June 26 and July 3, ex World Cup sponsor Gillette, the razor and men’s grooming company, experienced a 20% rise insearches, even though it is not associated with this year’s tournament.

UK based household retailer and provider of the England team’s suits, Marks and Spencer, also saw an increase in searches, up 6.5% in the same period.  Hertz car rental which are sponsoring UK tennis tournament Wimbledon, saw an 11.1% rise in searches during the same time period.

However while World Cup sponsors seen a decline in public interest, tennis brands are becoming increasingly popular. UK internet searches for tennis are up 177% from the week June 26-Jul 3 according to trend monitoring site Hitwise. Searches for tennis racquets have doubled year on year and the most searched for tennis racquets are Babolat and Wilson, Babolat being the racquet of choice for men’s winner Rafael Nadal and Wilson being used by women’s Serena Williams and men’s top seeded Roger Federer.

 

For the week ending July 3 the most searched for World Cup brands were

1. Australian airline Qantas

2. Grooming company Gillette

3. Car hire company Hertz         

4. British airline Virgin Atlantic

=5. German Airline Lufthansa

=5. UK Household retaile


Kit Kat is successfully hijacking the World Cup

Posted Wednesday, June 9th, 2010

Brand Republic 09-Jun-10,

Kit Kat is successfully hijacking this year’s Fifa World Cup in South Africa, despite not paying hundreds of thousands of pounds on sponsorship deals like rival Mars, according to the latest BR Video.
 

Following the launch of football-led TV campaigns by both Nestlé and Mars, both confectionery brands are starting to become associated with the World Cup.

But Mars, and AMV BBDO, will be disappointed to discover there was little resonance for its TV spot which resurrects John Barnes‘ rap in New Order’s ‘World In Motion’ song, some 20 years after its first airing.

The chocolate bar had better luck with Mars‘ new wrapper, featuring the England flag, which was mentioned by a number of people in our video.

However, out of the people who had seen both TV ads, Kit Kat was the clear favourite, with its ‘Cross your fingers’ concept described as “clever” and “more relevant”.

One person also preferred the unofficial Kit Kat ad because it was “very subtle”, he went on to add: “As soon as you see the red wrapper you know…  It stands out a lot more than Mars.”

There was better news for the official sports and beer sponsors Adidas and Budweiser, which were among the first names to spring to mind surrounding this year’s World Cup. Although they were joined by the likes of Nike, Foster’s and IPA, all of whom have no links with the event.

Last week, Mars and The Football Association confirmed they are considering legal action against Nestlé for a possible breach of sponsorship rules.

Mars, which last October announced a five-year partnership with The FA, is an official supplier to the England team.

The confectionery company is now in discussions with The FA about the possibility of initiating court action against Nestlé over its football-based ad campaign, ‘Fingers crossed’, created by JWT London.

They believe Nestlé is guilty of “passing off” an association with the England team, despite not being an official sponsor.

Four years ago, Mars undertook its own ambush marketing to coincide with the World Cup in Germany. It was not an official partner of the England team at the time.


Biggest brands: Top 100 online advertisers 2010

Posted Wednesday, May 19th, 2010

Marketing, May 2010

While the recession cut a swathe through above-the-line media channels, digital marketing grasped the opportunity to prove itself, writes Adam Woods.

As many advertisers were forced to cut back last year, so media owners probably comforted themselves with the thought that no part of the industry was immune to the effects of the UK‘s deepest recession since the 30s.

However, the latest research shows that digital media have, to some degree, managed to ride the storm. According to Nielsen, overall internet adspend rose from £461.4bn in 2008 to £506.3bn in 2009 – a 9.7% year-on-year increase. While half of the UK’s top 100 online advertisers cut their media spend in 2009, more than 80% of them increased their internet investment; many of them attracted by the prospect of solid ROI at a time when they were striving to cut marketing costs.

Advertising budgets overall have been slashed, but nonetheless advertisers want measurable returns,’ says Guy Phillipson, chief executive of the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB). ‘They have had to use the budgets they do have really wisely and have learned more in the process.’

Whether the downturn has acted as a catalyst in this process is a moot point, but many industry figures believe that internet advertising has started to come of age in the past two years.

‘There’s obviously a macroeconomic picture of a move to digital from traditional channels over the last few years, and I think the recession has only sharpened that,’ says Chris Clarke, chief creative officer at digital agency LBi.

Ironically, the increasing refinement of brands‘ online marketing abilities, allied to a general trend of online price deflation, has helped to take some of the edge off the growth of spending on digital (here excluding search, but including social media, affiliate marketing, mobile and online display in general).

Overall, financial services was the biggest-spending sector on internet advertising, though many of the biggest individual online advertisers were in the telecoms and media/entertainment sectors.

O2, Hutchison 3G, which owns 3, and merger candidates T-Mobile and Orange all increased their investment in web- based marketing. In the number-one spot, O2 remained by far the country’s biggest single online advertiser, allocating £15.2m, or almost 27% of its total media spend, to this platform.

O2 senior marketing manager Neill Garfield identifies social networking and the mobile internet as key emerging channels. Nonetheless, he refutes the suggestion that spend has been shifted wholesale out of traditional media and into online.

‘Often, it’s the reverse,’ he says. ‘Online channels are now at relative saturation, so we are investing in offline channels that stimulate online demand.’

The COI, the UK’s biggest advertiser last year, was also the second-biggest internet advertiser, boosting its internet spend by 45% to £10.4m. Nonetheless, its digital budget still accounted for less than 5% of its £218.3m overall media bill.

Some of the more dramatic changes at the top of the list include the doubling of internet spend at Virgin Media, Hutchison 3G and Moneysupermarket.com. However, Capital One provides the most notable example of a strategic shift among the top 20 advertisers.

The US credit card company was in the headlines in March when it scrapped its UK offline direct marketing programme and moved a proportion of the money saved into online communications. This was reflected in a 53.6% increase in Capital One’s internet spend to £2.9m, meaning this channel accounted for 99.98% of all its media spend, which fell as a whole by more than 65%.

More for less

Regardless of the effects of the recession, there appears to be a growing belief among brands that increasing adspend does not guarantee marketing success. By its own reckoning, Moneysupermarket.com, the 10th-placed online advertiser in the list, spent 22% less on its marketing last year, including search, but was still able to attract 14% more customers.

‘For us, it has become less about how much you spend and more about what you say and how you say it,’ says Ian Williams, the brand’s director of communications.

In a handful of sectors there was a sharp reduction in internet adspend. While they continue to make extensive use of the channel, media/entertainment brands collectively cut their budgets for online marketing by almost 16%.

Other sectors where big falls occurred include retail, which spent 42.3% less, and the property and pharmaceutical sectors, which made reductions of 45.5% and 55.2% respectively. However, while property and pharmaceuticals cut their marketing across the board last year, retailers raised their budgets overall; this suggests that online price deflation has enabled advertisers in this sector to make significant savings.

The figures compiled by Nielsen do not include a breakdown of information on the separate online advertising platforms. Nonetheless, some upward trends across digital marketing can be easily identified.

For example, mobile internet use is growing rapidly, as smartphone handsets offer users a greatly enhanced online experience on the move. The mobile advertising market is still relatively small, but is beginning to generate fresh revenues and helping to cannibalise those of other sectors.

‘Mobile internet is here to stay,’ says Garfield. ‘Inevitably, that will eat into media consumption in other channels, mostly from print. As transactional capabilities improve in mobile, this may even affect consumer retail and internet retailing.’

Big advertisers whose internet commitment remained relatively small in 2009 included Procter & Gamble and Unilever, each of which assigned 1.4% of their overall media budgets online.

However, they also committed more than in the previous year, and the expected ongoing rise of social media and mobile look set to extend major FMCG players’

‘The growth of mobile and maturing of the social web as an advertising opportunity have underpinned a growth in digital spend from the more reticent sectors,’ says Rhys Williams, managing partner at digital agency Agenda21.

As relatively recent additions to the online advertising portfolio, mobile, pre-roll video and social media are still in their initial growth phases, and are therefore likely to make an even bigger contribution in 2010, particularly as their interplay with offline media is explored.

According to IAB figures, online was the only media channel to grow during the first half of last year. TV and press adspend may have been squeezed, but the notion that digital and traditional forms of advertising operate in isolation from one another has been questioned recently.

Advertisers understand the combination of opportunities online and how they fit with traditional media,’ says the IAB’s Phillipson. ‘They are thinking of digital as the platform that runs through that entire media schedule.’

Sir Martin Sorrell has suggested that the picture presented by next year’s equivalent figures could be very different from this one. The growth in digital marketing is unlikely to stop as the economy continues to recover. Smart marketers will continue to invest their budgets where they can achieve the biggest returns and if innovation in digital continues, the industry will continue to thrive.

Price deflation: the ups and downs

While most of the brand-owners in the list spent more online in 2009 than they did in 2008, price deflation means this is not simply a case of online up, offline down.

Mainstream print and broadcast channels are turning over less than recently, but falling rates may mean brands are using them as much as, or more than they were.

‘A lot of our clients want to move away from broadcast and narrowcast, but they still spend healthily on TV – it is just that it has got cheaper in the last couple of years,’ says Chris Clarke, chief creative officer at digital agency LBi.

Similarly, a surplus of inventory means online rates have fallen, explaining apparent cutbacks made by the 19 advertisers in the top 100 that reduced their digital budgets. Most of these made cuts across the board, but Tesco, Hewlett Packard and Thomson spent less on digital while growing their wider media budgets.

‘Everyone is getting more bang for their buck,’ says Rhys Williams, managing partner at digital agency Agenda21. ‘The average cost per thousand online has gone down and I can’t see it going back up. It means advertisers don’t have to spend as much to get the same sort of impact.’

Coming up

Sainsbury’s just failed to enter the UK’s Top 100 online advertisers table despite increasing its internet marketing spend by 297% to £771,000. Fiat also bolstered its online advertising budget in spite of the recession with a 230% year-on-year increase to £702,000. Kraft grew its spend by 120% putting it in 104th position.

Going down

American Express slashed its online marketing spend by 43% year on year to £1.2m. British Airways also slashed its budget by 8.9% year on year placing the airline at 59th in the table. Holiday operator Thomson slashed its budget by 66% year on year to £992,000.

Methodology

Nielsen has improved the methodology used to work out the top 100 online advertisers for 2009. The new data is based on a Netview panel. Each panellist is given a meter and every time they view an ad online, it counts as one impression which is projected nationally. Previous surveys used a combination of figures from ABCe and declared information from the sites themselves. This tended to lead to inflated spend data. The new system creates a more robust methodology and removes the inflation factor. However, it means there is as yet limited comparative data with the previous year.

The figures are for display advertising and all figures are estimated costs based on a number of factors including rate card and industry discount factors. Details of the full methodology are available from Nielsen.


 
©2024 The Total Image Group
Home  |  About Us  |  Contact  |  Social Media  |  News  |  Create  |  Develop  |  Refine  |  Protect  |  Invest
The Total Image Group Ltd is a company registered in England and Wales with company number 02595342
The company's registered office is: 12a Melbury Court, 14 Lindsay Road, Poole, Dorset, BH13 6AT