Month: August 2006

Kiss embraces a future beyond radio

Marketing Week

The Kiss FM network will undergo its biggest rejuvenation to date next week. Its analogue network is being enlarged with the rebranding of Vibe in Bristol and East Anglia. There will also be a new logo and “sonic branding” alongside changes to the schedule, which has already been tweaked following the return of programme director […]

Bmibaby signs to sponsor UK ice hockey Elite League

Marketing Week

Bmibaby, the British Midland-owned budget airline, has signed up as the head- line sponsor of the UK’s Ice Hockey Elite League. The seven-year package is the league’s first sponsorship deal. The league, which includes ten teams across the UK and Northern Ireland, will be renamed as the Bmibaby Elite Ice Hockey League and the deal […]

Gillette Fusion: the best publicity a brand can get

Marketing Week

All publicity is good publicity, they say, so Gillette must be delighted with the buzz the launch of its five-bladed razor, Fusion, has created. As the exciting television ad explains, the Fusion is a “miracle”, which combines “a revolutionary technology and a unique idea”. Leaving aside the question of how adding yet another blade to […]

Alarm Belles ring at Drayton Bird as erotic rabbits overrun website

Marketing Week

It’s not every day that a leading marketer’s website releases a statement which announces: “We have nothing to do with this company. We’ve never sold bondage kits.” But Drayton Bird Associates was anxious to let it be known last week that it was not an outlet for nipple chains, erotic rabbits or the ever popular […]

Ignore the grassroots community at your peril

Marketing Week

We applaud the work the Newspaper Society is doing to up-weight marketers’ focus beyond national and London-centric media. Engaging with regional audiences and communicating at grassroots level is an opportunity that has been missed by too man

Call centre staff need to go with the flow

Marketing Week

Should call centres ditch the script (MW last week)? Certainly not. Should customers have to put up with the drone of robotic repetition? No. So, what’s the answer? Customers are bound to be as equally frustrated with uninformed, unstructured conversations as they are with prompted questions, if not more so. Our staff are trained so […]

Real-time targeting cuts out guesswork

Marketing Week

In response to your report on direct mail (MW August 17), I’d like to point out that you don’t have to target customers online to catch them while they are in the purchasing mood. There is another highly targeted marketing solution, using real-time data technology and based purely on a consumer’s purchasing habits, that is […]

Tories take up torch of rebranding task

Marketing Week

It would be simple to believe that policy is all political parties care about in the quest for votes. But ever since John F Kennedy was elected US president in 1960, and Ronald Reagan brought his Hollywood background to the White House 20 years later, leaders have increasingly relied on image to gain or maintain […]

Campaign of the month: Prehistoric Park

Marketing Week

The latest winner of the IAB Creative Showcase Awards is the Prehistoric Park campaign, developed for ITV by digital agency Play. The campaign used a mixture of overlays and expandable buttons and skyscrapers to promote the docudrama series to a target audience of families with 7- to 14-year-old children. The campaign avoided making grand claims […]

Online is not quite king of the ad world

Marketing Week

If you wander around London at the moment you’ll see ads for Yell.com on the sides of buses. For the marketing industry, what is most notable is not the clever use of GPS technology to allow the buses to show the most relevant ad for wherever they are along their route, but the agency behind […]

Search marketing feels pressure of click fraud

Marketing Week

Search marketing has been the engine of growth for online advertising ever since Google launched its services in the late 1990s. But following scare stories about click fraud and lack of privacy, could it be in danger of going out of fashion? The dangers for consumers have been put into focus by recent events in […]