The Friday Roundup
Every Friday we will post links to articles and trends which have caught our attention. This is the first such update. Enjoy!
Kay McCarthy is deputy managing director at McCann Erickson Ireland has an opinion piece in the Sunday Business post discussing the 2006 census and changes in the culture and composition of the consumer market that will affect our profession.
Stephen Davies from Edelman London talks about Innocent Drinks marketing strategy - Best summed up by the fact that “its genuine approach to its customers ensures that I’ll always stick an Innocent carton in my shopping trolley while on the weekly shop.”
John Naughton sums up some statistics on the use of social networking among teens.
Francois Gossieaux talks about the growing trend of companies involving their customers more in their business. Here are some examples:
•Ducati was able to fire their marketing department and replace it with a central customer community group responsible for all aspects of marketing - from product design and marketing communications, to creating the overall brand experience.
•In Germany, eBay was able to increase its revenue by 56% by getting existing eBay users to join customer communities.
•And through their “Connect and Develop” strategy - which involves employees, customers, prospects and even competitors, P&G is now able to derive 35% of their innovations and billions of dollars in revenue from the community it’s developed.
Business Week has a good article about online video and viral marketing.
Here’s a good pdf document on sports sponsorship. It talks about Adidas’ sponsorship of the Soccer World Cup a lot.
The BBC reports that Americans are increasingly using the internet as their primary source of political news.
David Schlesinger, the Reuters Editor-in-Chief, talks about the controversy last year when Reuters published and then withdrew two photographs from Lebanon that had been digitally altered.
Despite all the hype about YouTube stealing TV audiences 40% of homes tuned into the finals of American Idol.
Contagious magazine has a pdf document recapping the most contagious moments of 2006. As the magazine put it, “It’s been an interesting year, to say the least. Put your hand up now if you predicted that YouTube would have a mid-year price tag of $1.65bn, or that the population of Second Life would hit 2m by the end of the year. Who thought that the winner of this year’s console wars would be unlikely underdog Nintendo, or that shaky footage of a graffiti artist attacking President Bush’s Air Force One plane would become the most viewed branded viral ever?”
Shel Holtz describes how the American airline, JetBlue, uses YouTube to apologise to customers and outline the steps it is taking to ensure the delays their customers had to endure last week won’t happen again. Interesting from a crisis management point of view.
This week Trocaire launched the Just World online community, a Bebo-style social networking site designed for people who are interested in development and social justice. This is a first of its kind site in Ireland and a first for an Irish development agency. It will connect people in Ireland and around the world to find inspiration, get information and become involved in improving their local and global communities.