We recently spoke with Brian Cooper, the creative director of UK digital agency Dare. Here’s a snippet from the full interview, in which Cooper chats about Dare’s approach to marketing in a digital age, and the agency’s recent work for Vodafone. (Read more…)

The UK’s Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) published a statement today supporting the Grocery Supply Code of Practice. The code aims to deter retailers in the UK from forcing brands to slash prices to damaging levels.

As the financial squeeze continues to shape consumers’ expectations and buying habits, the IPA is concerned that brands may be suffering unfairly. While retailers lean on advertisers to keep prices down, shoppers too are anxious not to pay over the odds.

Price promotions have been an obvious weapon for advertisers during the 2008-2009 recession. A spokesman for the Institute of Sales Promotion (ISP) noted that the proportion of goods sold at discounted prices in the UK rose by 25% in 2009, and reached a value of £14 billion ($22.3 billion) in the month of November.

The ISP also noted that 70% of sales directors polled recently said they expected significant discounting to continue in the near future.

But the IPA’s October 2009 report, “Pricing for the upturn: How can brands fight back?” argued that advertisers and their brands could suffer long-term damage if they depended too much on discounts to attract shoppers.

The IPA had already explored the potential impact of discounting in an earlier report, “Price promotion during the downturn: shrewd or crude?” Data collected for that study indicated that price promotions eroded consumer loyalty toward brands.

The WARC’s coverage of the later IPA report also discusses further implications for advertisers. Worth a look.

January 26, 2010 should have been a red letter day for the UK. At last: The official announcement that the longest, deepest recession since the second world war was at an end. But the growth registered by the economy in the last quarter of 2009 was decidedly underwhelming, at 0.1%. Moreover, fears persist that the country may succumb to a “double dip” recession—and slide into negative growth again this year.

The continuing financial squeeze prolongs pressure on advertisers and marketers to watch every penny. In practice, that should reinforce the importance and momentum of online spending in the UK, while traditional media struggle. GroupM, for example, has forecast that only Internet and mobile ad spending will increase in 2010.

There are hopes that consumer confidence will rise as spring arrives, and help to ensure the recovery stays on track. Confidence levels climbed substantially between a record low in January 2009 and the end of the year, according to the Nationwide Building Society.  But expectations are still fragile, said Nationwide, and most consumers will need encouragement to spend.

Two developments are heating things up again on the music front. First came leaks of negotiations between Apple and the major labels over the company’s plans for music streaming in the wake of its December 2009 acquisition of Lala. Rumors are that Apple is pitching the idea of extending unlimited, cloud-based streaming privileges to music tracks purchased on iTunes. The notion is that if you downloaded a song on iTunes, you’ll no longer need to be at your computer or synchronize your iPod to listen to it. Once you release that song into the cloud, you can access it from any connected device.

There are a million potential wrinkles here. For instance:

(Read more…)

The New York Times finally came out with it — the official announcement of its long-rumored plan to re-erect a pay wall for its online content. Beyond the confirmation of what everyone suspected, the Times Co. offered virtually no details. Here’s what we know:

(Read more…)

According to the latest IPA Bellwether report,  budgets for Internet advertising and direct marketing in the UK both rose in Q4 2009, for the second quarter in a row. Overall marketing spend fell for the ninth quarter running, but the fall was the smallest since Q1 2008. Among the more than 300 firms surveyed for the report, 35% said they anticipated better prospects in 2010, as the economic recovery gathers pace.

These results will be welcome news for UK advertisers, and digital marketers in particular. But it is still too soon to tell whether the industry as a whole has really turned a corner and can look forward to positive growth in 2010. Just three months ago, ZenithOptimedia forecast a 13.1% drop in UK ad spending for 2009.

The storm continues over UK government plans to permit product placement in commercial television programming in the summer of 2010. A public consultation by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) closed on January 7.

Historically, rules established by the Office for Communications (Ofcom) have forbidden product placement in UK programs. But traditional broadcasters continue to suffer sharp declines in ad revenues, thanks chiefly to the Internet and new consumer viewing habits. Ofcom has estimated that the potential gain to commercial broadcasters from product placement within five years might be £25 million to £35 million annually (between $35 million and $49 million, at 2009 exchange rates), which would go some way to redress those losses.

While many advertisers and marketers are eager for a more permissive approach, some see it as a short-term fix for a long-term problem, or fear trouble ahead for other reasons. The Incorporated Society of British Advertisers (ISBA) has reversed its earlier (supportive) stance, and is now on record as saying paid product placement will mean both “higher costs for advertisers and more complaints from the viewing public.”

Other groups that oppose the proposal include children’s charities, national health and medical organizations and the National Union of Teachers. The reasons are not hard to fathom. According to the Guardian, one UK bookmaker has already started taking odds on which advertisers will most likely buy placement for their brands if given the go-ahead. Prominent among them in early January 2010 were Burger King, Guinness and Coca Cola. Product placement would not be allowed in programming designed for children, but many young people in the UK are exposed to hours of adult programming each week, and campaigners fear that greater exposure to such products may exacerbate already high levels of child obesity and alcohol-related problems in the UK. What’s your take on the matter?

During the course of last week we weighed in on several trends to watch in 2010. Here’s a quick and tidy round-up of those predictions.

• Seven Predictions for 2010 from eMarketer’s CEO, Geoff Ramsey: During 2010, as US ad budgets crack open just a little, look for an accelerated migration of ad dollars from traditional to digital media. Advertising on social networks will never attract a large share of marketers’ ad dollars, while the classic interruption/disruption model of advertising, whereby marketers insert unwanted, usually irrelevant ads as a price the consumer must pay to view desired content, will erode, if not fade away.



• Social Media: Marketers will demand better ways to manage and measure the impact of earned media—the additional unpaid exposure a brand gets when consumers share about the brand online. Search will get more social in several ways: by including real-time content in results (e.g., Twitter posts), adding information from social network friends to results, and using collective information from other Web users to hone search relevance. These trends will yield new ad formats that may incorporate friends’ viewpoints or interactions directly into the ad—and will raise new red flags among privacy advocates. (Read more…)

A chilling prospect for the UK’s advertising industry, summarized by The Guardian’s Mark Sweney today:  Officials at the Central Office of Information (COI), which co-ordinates all the government’s advertising and marketing, fear that online budgets will be slashed if the Conservatives win next year’s general election.  The COI aims to boost the use of interactive channels, including mobile, and raised digital marketing spending by an estimated £40 million (84%) in the year to March 2009.  The big question is whether digital will survive the harsh cuts in public service spending promised by the Tories.

eMarketer’s own Karin von Abrams discusses the impact of UK regulators entering the behavioral targeting debate. A good read for anyone looking to get caught up on the issue. Money quote:

Behavioral targeting is very tricky territory for everyone. Advertisers, publishers and ISPs all stand to gain enormously from technology that delivers relevant results to Web users. But many consumers are not convinced that their data will be kept safe and secure, and never traced back to them as individuals or households. Such doubts are amplified when they hear that the UK Information Commissioner and the European Commission continue to be concerned about targeting. The OFT investigation may be a watershed event.

The online ad probe is one of two studies announced by the OFT for final publication next year. The second will turn the spotlight on potentially misleading pricing practices online. In both cases, the OFT’s conclusions may lead to more restrictive laws or regulations, and the Competition Commission may investigate any firms that appear to be involved in anti-competitive activity.

The United States Congress is scheduled to discuss similar issues soon.