The Marketing Week – 31/5/2013

Welcome to The Marketing Week, your guide to the good, the bad and the ugly in the marketing industry over the last seven days.

CAMPAIGN OF THE WEEK

PayPal ad
Paypal

Paypal is tired of being seen only as payment provider so to change that it is launching its first brand campaign in the UK.

The marketing drive will showcase the breadth of services it offers – from money transfers to the partnerships it has with on and offline retailers such as Mothercare, Topshop, JohnLewis.com and Asos. It aims to demonstrate how the services make shopping simpler in an effort to increase the number of transactions made using Paypal.

The strategy echoes a similar one adopted by the business in the US last year where it partnered with Hollywood director Jeff Goldblum for a series of quirky ads.

GOOD WEEK FOR: Great Britain

VisitBritain

VisitBritain, the UK’s tourism board has claimed its ongoing GREAT Britain marketing campaign has boosted UK Plc by £200m since it launched. That’s a return of £8 for every £1 invested in it, according to the tourism body. An Ipsos MORI survey of 15,000 people commissioned by VisitBritain found those who’d seen the ads were twice as likely to visit the UK equating to 422,000 additional visitors in the 2 years since March 2012. James Bond and The Beatles are amongst the British icons that have appeared in the campaign and future iterations could star ITV’s hit show Downton Abbey.

Facebook

BAD WEEK FOR: Facebook

The social network caved in to the pressure from activists over its response to gender based hate-speech. After initially standing by its practices. Facebook committed to a five-point safety programme to tackle hate speech on the site following a week-long campaign from women’s activist groups. Lobbyists invited advertisers to challenge the social network over their ads appearing against offensive pages, which made light of domestic violence. Fifteen advertisers including Nissan pulled advertising from the site and Nationwide continued its boycott of the social network even after it enhanced its guidelines to protect brands.

BEST TWEETS OF THE WEEK:

Social Media Insider ‏@SocialMedia411 On Yahoo!’s acquisition of Tumblr
“The Response To Yahoo’s New Tumblr Ads Hasn’t Been Huge, But It Has Been Uniformly Negative”

Chris Book ‏@ChrisBook CEO of mobile firm ChatterPlug On Nike’s decision to cut ties with Lance Armstrong’s Livestrong charity
“Nike making huge mistake with Livestrong. @LanceArmstrong made them both, and despite a vocal few against him, his base is incredibly loyal.”

Stefan Bardega ‏@stefbard3h Managing partner of Mediacom On Mediacom’s efforts to become a tech and data firm
“@daniellenewnham I would argue we are already there – our business is 30% digital now with 300 digital experts”

Fabio Goncalves @fabio229 US-based ad-man On Facebook introducing verified pages for brands 

”A little late but good move RT @MarketingWeekEd #Facebook emulates #Twitter’s blue tick w/ Verified Pages & Profiles”

Tom Smith ‏@ctsmithiii US-based integrated marketing and consumer insight exec On luxury brands being afraid of digital and social marketing
”Luxury brands need to remember the internet penalizes those that hoard information.”

ONE TO WATCH

An open source Apple?
Apple CEO Tim Cook has hinted that Apple’s notoriously ‘walled garden’ iOS ecosystem may begin to soon become less restrictive. Speaking at a conference in the US earlier this week, he defended Apple’s current policy of restricting developers’ access to key APIs and rigid approval policy. But he did note that it may begin to liberalise soon. However, this would “not to the degree that we put the customer at risk of having a bad experience,” he said.  

INTERNATIONAL NEWS

Japanese mobile operator Softbank has raised $50m to invest in future start-ups based in the US. The Japanese operator’s investment arm has already invested in a number of digital start-ups that have went on to reach high profile, namely BuddyMedia, Huffington Post and InMobi.
 
Diageo has promoted former Asia-Pacifc CMO James Thompson to the global role of managing director for Diageo Reserve. In his new role he will oversee Johnnie Walker Blue Label, Ciroc and Zacapa.
 

 
DATES FOR YOUR DIARY

  • 5 June – Tesco First quarter results are released.
  • 5 June – The Retail Sales monthly and annual reports by the European Commission’s Eurostat are released. It measures the changes in sales across the Euro Zone retail sector.
  • 6 June – The 2013 AOP Digital Publishing Awards will take place at London’s Roundhouse.
  • 6 June – The Future of Digital Marketing. Marketing Week’s sister company Econsultancy hosts this one day event where speakers from AKQA and Twitter will discuss the latest in online marketing. http://econsultancy.com/uk/events/fodm_london
  • 7 June – Newspaper ABCs for May are released.
  • 10 June – Social Media Influence 2013. Speakers from Microsoft, Lithium and Poke showcase case studies and discuss the latest developments in the converging worlds of social and mobile media.

Recommended

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According to statistics released during its latest earnings call, all is well in Facebook land. The brand has more than 1 billion active users globally and around 665 million of them are daily users. Facebook says the same is true for the UK where monthly user numbers continue to climb, now at 34 million people.