Search results matching tag 'Brand Republic'

Seriously, you can have my job – New editor for Brand Republic wanted

255762 — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 14:54:00 GMT

Seriously yes, it's true. After the longest time anyone can imagine (I checked) Haymarket is looking for a new editor for Brand Republic.

It isn't anything that I said and honestly it has nothing to do with with this blog post I wrote earlier today about Techcrunch and Twitter, which some people thought was an ethical faux pas (though clearly not me).

Shocking as it is, I was launch editor of Brand Republic. I can remember our launch party for so many reasons - 9/11 2001 is a hard one to forget. Not a great deal of people, but much champagne; sadness and paranoia.

That said the site has been a great success and we've had some great people work here over the years, so it is sad to go, but there you have it. The site is moving on, getting ready for its next big redesign and I am moving on also.

I have taken on the role of Social Media & International Editor at Haymarket Brand Media and will work with all the great media brands here (Campaign, Marketing, Media Week – not forgetting Brand Republic itself) and other individuals looking at how we use social media and continuing to practice what I preach.

It's all the stuff I like doing and writing about. Just as soon as they find the right person for this job.

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Cannes does not fit this age of austerity

1225254 — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 08:15:00 GMT

Today the London Business School reports marketers 'must focus on consumers looking for bargains in a new era of austerity'. For agencies, austerity is truly biting hard. Waves of redundancies have generated a miserable atmosphere, and inevitably damaged morale. And lots of very good people gone. It's not just been a case of 'dead wood'.

In these straitened times, any overt displays of opulent spending or lavish entertaining are rightly frowned upon as being out of tune with the times. This is Gordon Brown's Britain.

Except for one very visible case. In June, agency heads will be jetting off for a week of thinly disguised hedonism in the Cannes sun. I'm sorry, but it all feels very nineties, if not eighties, to me and entirely inappropriate for 2009.

Forget about the awards themselves, let's assume all the Direct winners will be very worthy and fine examples of creative innovation, even if hardly any (as was the case last year) are from the UK. And I'm sure the presentations will be insightful and well attended.

No, think of the image being projected by all those jolly important people sipping cocktails outside the Carlton and cracking open the Dom Perignon aboard a private yacht, while back home their staff await the dreaded call from HR. Think what hay the Sun or Mail would make of it. Then think of the employees who have lost their jobs to pay for those c.£2,000 tickets (plus flights and accommodation). I can tell you what those employees will be thinking about it.

I wonder how much 'insight into austerity' people will find on the beach at Cannes?

Digital media sets agenda for all media. Only GAAP (Generally Accepted Advertising Practise) gets in the way.

1319935 — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 16:54:00 GMT

75% of the world’s top advertisers and 80% of the UK’s are working with Facebook, says Blake Chandlee at today’s FT Digital Media conference [#ftmedia]. I love getting predictions right. Now the debate has moved on. It isn’t about getting it, it’s about measuring it. Doh. Instead of reach and frequency, we should be measuring interactions and engagement. Doh. Expect to hear more of the phrase ‘user connections per year’ in the coming year. Doh.

Now over the past couple of years in my companies we expended hours of angst and technical effort to build models that link online advertising activity with website traffic. It’s amazing to me how separate these [still] can be in the corporate world. Especially when it comes to business audiences, who spend most of their time online using client (that’s a technical term) communication tools. Interestingly, the 20th century model of agency infrastructure – a more generous definition than ‘BDA’ perhaps - created discipline specific revenue generating lines that often struggled to combine forces and do the right thing for the Clients' brands.

The Clients (the ones that pay the bill) were excited by these efforts. But not everyone was. The new measurement system exposed some quite glaring weaknesses in the world according to GAAP (that’s my personal definition of Generally Accepted Advertising Practise). Oh, how we argued wth all our other agency colleagues. We had simply set out to get a better bang from the online buck, we said. We weren’t planning to solve world peace or reorganise the entire marketing communication process. But in the end, that’s what's needed, and that's what's happening too.

I’m not keen on creating yet another social media discipline-specific argument. I am interested, however, in how brands go to market, how media is organised, how consumers engage with media, and how consumers engage or ignore brands. It’s clear from Facebook’s numbers that brands getting it isn’t the problem. brands are having a go. If you’re not online, you’re not on the map. It’s a more a question of how much control the brand's prepared to give up in the process, and who to turn to for advice.

George Parker on this site been railing at the average adverati’s incompetence with these social technologies and facile obsession with the next big thing bandwagon. He’s right (with notable exceptions on Brand Republic, of course) in the sense that there aren’t many agency CEO types who write their own blogs or twitter much. Funnily enough, a survey in October last year by Sapient* put understanding digital as a top priority for global CMOs, and agencies that understand digital as a DNA thing rather than an acquired thing should do well. I’d argue that there’s a starker truth behind this. Clients don’t want to pay agencies to learn on their paid time.

Reflection from the digerati at the FT conference so far is positive, and notably setting the agenda for everything else in adland. Plenty has happened in the last year that elevates the argument about common metrics, engagement, redefining media, redefining content and the role of the brands in providing the financial oxygen upon which media has traditionally depended. We have a long way to go, but it’s good every now and again to recognise how far we have come.

*Sapient is an interactive agency. Survey results: unsurprising.
*Sapient’s numbers look quite good at the moment.

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Thanks for following

255762 — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 09:05:00 GMT

Brand Republic has racked up more than 1,000 followers on Twitter, which is a mini landmark for us. Thank you.

The uptake in Twitter over the past couple of weeks has rocketed, both for BR and the wider world. In the last two weeks alone BR added 300 followers - it sort of helps when you have celebs like Jonathan Ross and Stephen Fry (celeb Twitterer in chief) beings so enthusiastic about it all. Thanks to you all. We're trying to follow most people back, it seems only fair.

It's is going to be very interesting to see exactly how big the Twittersphere becomes. For a site like Brand Republic having a good Twitter feed is going to be important. So much more so IMHO than say a Facebook group. Facebook groups came, grew quickly and then? Well, yeah, then there was the "what next?" bit. Still figuring that one out.

We're also trying not to be all bot with our Twitter feed and will endeavour do live Twittering as well mixed in with our news coverage. We'll post when our bloggers have put new material up as well.

Like everyone else, this is still one big on going experiment (so we'll experiment), but we've already learnt a few things along the way. Personally, I like Twitter because it is social and fun, but it is "mostly" work related and it is that "mostly" that makes it valuable.

If anyone has any suggestions for Twitter activity let us know, but we'll definitely try to Twitter interesting stuff when we're out and about and any breaking news we hear on top of our regular RSS like news feed.

We'll also try to interact, retweet stuff we like and reply to any direct messages you might send us.

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Welcome to Brand Republic 2.1

255762 — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 08:18:00 GMT

We've won a PPA award so we had to do something. This morning we have introduced a few changes to Brand Republic improving navigation, but most importantly introducing a new and much improved community.

We have been working on this for a good while as one of the big successes of Brand Republic when we relaunched it last spring was the community, which saw Brand Republic introduce blogs for the first time.

The initial software we used was not the most flexible - it was something we have always wanted to improve and we have done that today.

From the homepage onwards you will see the first of the changes with the new dual navigation bar at the top making it not only easier to find your way around Brand Republic, but also to find content on the site that you never even knew was there.

You will also be able to see the first signs of improvements to community on the homepage with stories and blogs on the homepage now indicating how many comments readers have made allowing people to get an immediate feel for debate taking place on the site.

The heart of the changes can be seen in the forum pages where you will see a new layout breaking forums and blogs down into "Most Recent" and "Most Discussed".

Inside individual forums themselves you will see more information about individual users' posting and ways of contacting them. You will also be able to rate individual forums, posts and add them and other users as favourites.

Like a social networking site you can now build up lists of friends, which you can manage under "My profile" section that you will also see in community.

The blogs area is one part of Brand Republic where we hope there will be plenty of fresh content for you to see in the coming weeks and months.

We already have a team of bloggers on board but we plan to add plenty more. A dozen or so are already signed up, but we are looking for more new bloggers. Contact me if you want to join Brand Republic's community of bloggers.

Browsing individual bloggers and seeing what they have written about has been made much easier. Mostly because our blogs now look much more like traditional blogs than they did before.

There is a full archive of each blogger month by month and posts can also easily be browsed by tags as well.

All blogs have their own RSS feeds so if you want to add any of our bloggers to your RSS feeds it is easier to do than ever. The ability to rate blog posts has also been introduced.

Another important change is that you can search across all blogs and forum posts making this area of the site as useful as we hope you find the rest of Brand Republic.

We hope you like the changes and please let us know what you think.

*Follow me on Twitter*

We are six

255762 — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 10:03:52 GMT

It's a big day in many senses, but it is also Brand Republic's sixth birthday. The site has gone through many changes since it launched and there are many more to come.

This year, however, has been a significant one for Brand Republic after our major relaunch in February, which gave the site a completely new look and feel.

It's one that I feel works so much better, giving us more scope and options in how we present content to you, our readers. We have entered the world of social media with blogs and expanded our forums. We are working on more developments in that area.

I won't go over all the changes we have introduced, but these appear to have gone down well with many, not least the AOP judges who shortlisted Brand Republic for two awards: best design and best business website.

We have come along way in other senses, having built the site to hit more than 2m pages impressions a month and more than 250,000 unique users. These are numbers that continue to grow as the site expands in the UK and internationally.

There's much to look forward to as we spend a moment looking back. Having your launch party on 9/11 2001 made for a sobering occasion, but it is one from which we have all moved on, but not forgotten.

Brand Republic is free

255762 — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 08:21:26 GMT

It's been two weeks since Brand Republic relaunched, so it seems like a good time to see what people think about the new free to access site.
The biggest change, that may not be immediately apparent to everyone, is that Brand Republic is now, of course, free.

It was a huge change for Haymarket and Brand Republic, moving from a subscription model to a free to access, where all a visitor has to do to access the wealth of content, take part in our forums, or these blogs, is to register.

The move to free access has coincided with not only adding more content (there is also Campaign, Marketing and Media Week, as well as a number of monthly industry titles such as Marketing Direct, Promotions & Incentives and Revolution), but more in the way of personalisation.

The personalisation we have added effectively allows you to build and design your own homepage with the content you want to see from Brand Republic and elsewhere, as well as maintain a personal profile page for each member.

We're particularly proud of this and its really quite cool. Within Brand Republic you can select all the news feeds you want from the site, be they from DM or digital (among others), and combine these with news from any other source.

With your RSS reader you can view your favourite news sources in one place. So you can add news from the BBC, Reuters and Page Six as well. Just go to MY BR on the main navigation bar and click on My Page on the menu on the left to get started.

It's all drag and drop and really there is nothing to it. It's easier to use than many RSS software. If you run into problems there's a simple walk thru guide that gives you a step-by-step guide.

There is much more on the new Brand Republic and we will be adding to it as we go along.

As well as great personalisation tools, Brand Republic has pushed forward social networking allowing you to comment on all our stories, on creative work, blogs (like this one) and the much expanded discussion forums.