The Marketing Week

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

The wait is over. In response to demand from 20,000 online fans McDonald’s is bringing back the McRib. The barbecue pork sandwich makes a comeback on December 31, just in time for some New Year hangovers.

The sandwich was removed from the menu in 2002 and although it will not become a permanent feature on the McDonald’s menu, the brand said it wanted to make its consumers feel “empowered” to bring back their favourites.

Given the role of online in the McRib’s return, McDonalds is focusing on social media for its marketing. Documentary-style content focuses on consumers who loved the sandwich in the past. In addition, the company’s Facebook page saw a reach of four million consumers on its first post about the product, showing that a little personalisation has gone a long way for the brand.

Good Week for

Save the Children

Christmas jumpers

Save the Children’s Christmas Jumper Day campaign succeeded in raising both awareness and money for the charity. The total number of social media mentions about Christmas Jumper Day reached 34,653 mentions across Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, blogs and forums. Three of the campaigns hashtags were trending on 12 December when the campaign was launched and three million people stated that they were taking part on the day. This left the charity well on track to reaching its £3.2 million fundraising target. Particularly good news, as the campaign generated 50% more mentions about donating and fundraising when compared with other 2014 charity campaigns.

Bad Week for

Consumer confidence

The latest GfK report into consumer confidence paints a gloomy picture. Rather than getting a festive bounce as people prepare for Christmas, the Index has gone into reverse. This was the worst performance for consumer confidence in 9 months as concerns over a dampening house market and possible interest rate rises caused UK consumer confidence to worsen to -4 in December, from -2 in November. Analysts were expecting an improvement.

The outlook was no better when looking at YouGov/Cebr’s report, which also showed a dip. Retailers may have been hoping for some Christmas cheer after a mild autumn hit high street sales and pushed back Christmas shopping but that appears in short supply. YouGov’s Steve Harmston says its figures point to households’ Christmas outlay “flat-lining”. Expect some big discounts on the high street and at the supermarkets over the next few crucial days as retailers do all they can to tempt shoppers to part with cash.

International News

Johnnie Walker appoints Anomaly as global creative agency

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQ7kWpTrtJw

Diageo’s Johnnie Walker announced Anomaly as its new global creative agency following the success of “The Gentleman’s Wager” earlier this year, a short film starring Jude Law created by Anomaly to promote the Johnnie Walker Blue Label brand.

The film reached 28 million views on YouTube in its first two weeks and resulted in an average view duration that was 2.3 times the average for online video.

The move brings an end to a 15-year relationship between Johnnie Walker and BBH, who were responsible for the “Keep Walking” campaign.

Amazon launches one-hour delivery

In New York and need to buy something and receive it within an hour? Not a problem anymore as Amazon has just launched a service that will do just that across 25,000 different products. Prime members will be charged $7.99 for the service, with two-hour delivery for free.

How will hi-tech Amazon do this? By dispatching bike messengers. The service is expected to roll out to other locations across the US next year as the race to provide the best delivery options in ecommerce continues.

One To Watch

Instagram and brand engagement

A Socialbakers report showed that brands gain nearly 50 times more engagement on Instagram than Twitter, suggesting that brands may see more potential in investing in the image platform in the near future.

Engagement was measured as the sum of ‘retweets’, ‘replies’ and favourites’ features, such as those seen on Twitter – however, brands should be careful about directly comparing the two platforms, which have different objectives.

Tweets

https://twitter.com/charliebhoy72/status/545277483268841472

 

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