The latest figures from the Internet Advertising Bureau have found that display advert spend was nearly £1 billion in 2010, up by just over 27% on last year.
Social media and video advertising has pushed up revenue by 23% according to the IAB, that is almost a quarter of total online ad spend.
Read the full article on new media age
Recent reports have shown that West End retail sales fell by 0.5% in February, although the recent slump has been blamed by many on the ongoing building works at Tottenham Court Road and Bond Street tube stations.
Against this backdrop London property giants Shaftsbury approached underscore for some fresh thinking ways to market their flagship opportunity with the Carnaby that would give them a competitive edge when approaching potential new tenants.
We started by pulling out and highlighting key messages from recent press and social media, and employed a headline message of “everybody’s talking about it” to allow quick communication of the USP’s without people having to sift through pages of copy, graphs and tables.
A fold out format allowed the info to be engaging and to stand out from the norm and we’re really pleased with the finished product, as was our immediate client Sam Cuthbert Brown at Cushman & Wakefield who stated “the feedback is it is the coolest brochure they have ever had”
Social media like Facebook were initially designed to connect people, although a lot of brands nowadays are trying to increase the amount of sales through these types of channels. Primarily they still focus on keeping the fans updated and managing the customer relationship by answering their questions about products or services.
But now it seems that companies start to use Facebook and other media more and more for “soft selling”. Once the relationship between customer and brand is built, the company allows customers to save time by buying products via the Facebook page of the company.
As the brands start gathering information about their followers from the moment they subscribe, it makes online buying a lot more personalised and easy for the customer. Advertisements can be specifically targeted and therefore increase the amount of selling/buying.
Have you already bought something via Facebook or any of the other social media?
Online social media has been playing an increasingly significant role in world events recently, but nowhere more importantly than in Japan. The earthquake and tsunami put the telecommunications infrastructure of the country under pressure. Soon mobile phonelines and landlines were congested or unavailable. However, the Internet remained relatively unaffected, allowing people to contact their loved ones via Facebook or Twitter.
Only one hour after the earthquake, Japanese people send over 1,200 tweets per minute to inform everyone about their status. For many of them, Twitter and Facebook have become the easiest and fastest way to publish emergency numbers or for others to find shelters for those who found themselves homeless.
This is just one of the benefits of social media and how the virtual universe can impact and benefit real life situations….and just one more example of why it pays to be social.
You’d best practice your poker face routine now as outdoor advertising is set to become personal! According to a report from the Centre for Future Studies, we will see a revolution in digital outdoor advertising in the next 12 months. The emotion recognition software detects our mood and responds by creating an ad that fits our assumed needs.
This new technology will allow brands to connect with their customers on a deeper level. 3M company GTG predicts several ways of advertising, for example;
Personal Preference Profile’s
A profile with a huge amount of personal information such as the consumers’ body type, allergies, anniversaries, favorite food or color and so on. This profile can help to adjust the advertisement as personal as possible, keeping in account the different information that the company knows about them.
Mobile Phone Exchange Information with Advertising
Combined with the PPP (Personal Preference Profile) this way of advertising will identify a person and, for example, could replace the supermodel from a 3Djeans ad with the consumer.
Advanced High Definition Vending Machines
Vending machines with gesture-based controllers that enable consumers to see and feel products before buying them. The 3D printing technology enables the vending machine to produce the product in a matter of minutes.
How do you feel about being targeted in such a way? Do you think that the companies will take advantage of your state of mind at that moment? Let us know what you think.
It seems like spring is in the air and on this particular sunny Shrove Tuesday the annual Pancake Day Race took place across several locations in London. We went to down to Bankside to see which team was best at racing with and flipping their pancake.
For those who actually wanted to eat the pancakes, there was a stand selling the delights and a full range of different toppings were available, ideal for those with a sweet tooth! Seemingly everyone was in the mood for pancakes as there was a huge queue of customers!
At around 1 pm, the first heat of Pancake Day Race started. Several teams of the local companies at Bankside were ready to give their best. Although some of the pancakes didn’t survive the race (many ended up on the floor!), the overall winner of the Pancake Race Day in London Bridge was a young and enthusiastic team from the British School of Osteopathy. They were honored by Stuart Davie, CEO of the charity “Paintings in Hospitals” and received an award.
All of the donations that were gained from this event will go to the charity “Paintings in Hospital” which lends works of arts to hospitals and other health care facilities in the UK.
Check out our video on the underscore facebook page.
When I first read ‘This looks great – Letterpress on your iPad’ on my twitter feed, I instantly thought…BRILLIANT PRINT REALLY IS DEAD!! But more importantly I don’t own an iPad, so even if this does look great and is great I wouldn’t be able to indulge in such technological typographic experiments. My gutt reaction left a foul taste in my mouth, it was as though I had just licked a recently inked wood block. Although being the enquisitive young whipper snapper that I am, I persued, clicking on the tiny url attached to the enthusiastic 43 character tweet, not knowing what I might find at the end of the promise laiden link.
It is always good as a designer to have some form of release. Personally I like to get together with a group of university friends and put together an exhibition, and this years effort is titled Subjects for Change.
The whole concept for subjects for change is that we all go through a number of life changing decisions that can alter the way our future career can flow, whether by choice or not.
The exhibition explores lots of different disciplines including art, photography, illustration, graphics and fashion design supplied by a number of contributors from different backgrounds.
The show is held at the Red Gate Gallery in Brixton and is on from the 25th of February until the 3rd of March so why not pop down and see what we’re about.
INSIGHT: Subjects For Change Exhibition from How We Work on Vimeo.
We came across this great site yesterday, (a sub-domain of the official games website) where you can personalise your very own Wenlock or Mandeville mascots. You are free to add from a huge variety of clothing, sports and colours to make your very own mascot look unique.
When your look is complete you then sign up to register. This enables you to come back to the website and view your unique character within the gallery – an online community of mascots from all over the world. Share your character with your friends, family and even your work colleagues! Have a look at ours on the gallery page ‘Find your friends’ mascot numbers 1265, 1286.
It is a fun website with a lot of interactivity and colour and one that will surely keep adding interest right up to the beginning of the games next year. Like most of the Olympic venues at the moment, the site is still very much in the making with only one out of four online games currently working. However, we are quite sure we will get notified as and when these are complete now that we have registered.
When we created our characters there were only 640 characters in the community. We will no doubt expect that figure to rise exponentially when the word is out!
Visit mascot games