The Marketing Week

CAMPAIGN OF THE WEEK

Planning a weekend break? Then Eurostar wants to hear from you. It’s making a return to our TV screens after 18 months with a marketing campaign that encourages customers to share their experiences of Paris and London. It is aimed at what it dubs the “Eurostar generation”, people who live and work between the cities and the stories they create as they travel.

In the UK, the ad travels through Paris showing streets, bars and restaurants, the Eiffel Tower, people eating frog’s legs and graffiti and a love story. The French ad mirrors it, showing off aspects of London including people eating jellied eels and drinking tea, tube travel and, again, a love story.

Eurostar is benefitting from the halo effect of the Olympics and the increase in visitors to London. It believes this new brand push will help to link French, British and Belgian culture and inspire people to travel. As the strapline claims: “Stories are waiting”.

GOOD WEEK FOR…

Marketers
 
Marketers are generally a chipper bunch. The very nature of the business is selling a better and brighter tomorrow. Even accounting for such sagacity the latest Bellwether report finds marketers brimming.

Marketing budgets were revised up by the largest margin for 13 years in the third quarter as news of an improving economy left marketers more confident about the prospects for their companies and industries. 

News the purse strings are being loosened is a real boon. Investment in marketing is not profligacy, not an operating expense to be excused but an investment in driving future growth.

BAD WEEK FOR…. 

British Gas
 
Boy. When is it ever not a bad week for British Gas and the rest of the big six energy suppliers? Last month, the company and industry was kicked around by the Labour Party looking to score points by getting tough on the cause of the cost of living crisis and now British Gas has been hung, drawn and quartered after announcing price increases of 9.2 per cent.

Twitter lit up with apoplexy, indicative of the rage felt by the company’s customer base at large. To add insult to injury, the Prime Minister waded in, encouraging customers to switch to rivals. British Gas was not the first to hike prices, SSE did so last week, and it will not be the last but as the market leader it will take the biggest hit.  

INTERNATIONAL NEWS

Mondelez is taking personalised shopping to new heights with the launch of “Smart Shelves” with cameras on them. The snacks maker is rigging grocery stores across the US with Microsoft Kinect sensors later this year to generate insight it can use to create targeted ads. The Oreo maker is trialling the service ahead of wider roll out in 2015. It could also be coming to shores a little closer to home after the business did not rule out expanding it worldwide should the trials prove successful.

To address concerns about privacy, Mondelez assures the “Smart Shelf” programme is “completely anonymous”.

ONE TO WATCH

Hot on the heels of Nike’s FuelBand SE launch earlier this week, rival Adidas announced its own push for the wearable tech space. The Adidas “smart running watch” is pricier than Nike’s wristband, however, the German brand has loaded it with far more features including a music player. The wearable tech space is set to explode in the coming months as the likes of Samsung, FitBit and Jawbone look to capitalise on a market that analysts predict could be worth $19bn (11.9bn) by 2018.

TWEETS OF THE WEEK

@NeilMortensen – Thinkbox research and planning director on Sky’s AdSmart
#TVshoestring Hendy Ford and Ocado using Sky Adsmart already smashing sales targets. Yes, the REAL metrics. Sales. @skymediaupdates

@AnnMMack – director of trend spotting at JWT New York on ‘The 3% Conference’ held in New York City this week aimed at building the business case for more female company directors
Parting advice for the #3percentconf crowd: Lean on men to make change. The glass ceiling needs to be broken from the other side.

@JanRezab – CEO of social media analytics company Social Bakers on Google’s latest financial results
#GoogleQ3earnings: “YouTube is our brand torch bearer!”, Nikesh Arora. That $1.65 billion now looks cheap!!

@Djack_Journo – Late night editor of The Times on The Guardian’s editorial choices
Three days in a row @guardian splashes on spying. No wonder its circulation is in free fall