Brand Republic Blogs

Yahoo set to announce $1.1bn to buy Tumblr on Monday External website

by @gordonmacmillan, 19/05/2013

AllThingsD is reporting that last week’s rumoured deal that would see Yahoo pay as much as $1bn buy Tumblr is set to become a reality and will be announced officially on Monday.

by Ardi Kolah, 17/05/2013

Defamatory video must be removed from the internet rules Ireland's High Court in an action against Facebook, YouTube and Google that could open the floodgates to fresh litigation against the internet giants

Viva Forever brand Beckham External website

by John Reynolds, 17/05/2013

What was David Beckham’s best career move? Signing for Manchester United? His £25m transfer to Real Madrid?

Nope, it was his marriage to Posh Spice in 1999, a union that yanked him from the back pages of newspapers to the front pages and kick-started the unceasing rise of brand Beckham into a global phenomenon.

What we can all learn from how Daft Punk won the web External website

by Chris Reed, 17/05/2013

For an industry supposedly in demise, the music business is leading the way when it comes to generating social currency. And, for the savviest of social marketers, generating sales as well.

by Martin Talks, 17/05/2013

Bricks and motor retail business is under huge pressure and technology sometimes seems to be its enemy. But in fact technology could be offline retail’s saviour.

A challenge is to know what technology to invest in when it everything changes so fast. In such circumstances, it is a great help to root oneself in the way consumers make decisions and consider how technology can best be used to persuade them. There are three key principles of persuasive decision interfaces and in each case digital technology can give the offline retailer an edge:

by @gordonmacmillan, 17/05/2013

Can Yahoo get its “cool back”? As that is what it is trying to do according to CFO Ken Goldman and one of the ways it might try and achieve that is to buy Tumblr.

by Richard Fullerton, 17/05/2013

Unilever - Bringing vitality to life.

Our agency, MCS, recently exhibited at the Suffolk Business Exhibition in Ipswich and we held a competition for visitors to our stand whereby they had to recall the slogans of 17 top brands. Most were flummoxed and the eventual winner ‘only’ got 11 correct (probably with a little help from the internet). Try these three (I’ve reversed them so you have to guess the brand from the slogan): 1) Trusted everywhere, 2) Looking after your world, 3) Bringing it all together.

Data & Creative: friends or foes? External website

by Dina Green, 17/05/2013

The marketing world is a very different place from what it was fifteen, ten or even five years ago. The impact of technology on how marketers approach and engage audiences is something that is still in a major state of flux and, with the current speed of technological development, this isn’t likely to change soon. But this is familiar ground.

by Mark Holden, 17/05/2013

We’ve heard this before: we need to get serious about mobile as game-changer, especially in retail. And, yes, we’ve heard it because it’s impossible to ignore. The rapid developments are particularly acute in the UK. We love our smartphones: the average UK mobile connection used 424 megabytes of data per month, ahead of Japan (392 megabytes) and the US (319 megabytes), despite being 4G newbies.

by Greg Taylor, 17/05/2013

Some robots would be no good at mixing a martini. C3PO, for example, would no doubt bruise the gin with those inflexible elbows of his, despite his plummy butler act. But these ‘guys’ put the most balletic of bartenders to shame. Fresh from MIT’s Senseable City Lab and rocking the bar in Milan is Makr Shakr: three robotic arms that can mix any drink you desire.

by John Carroll, 17/05/2013

On a recent aeroplane flight, I looked around the cabin and all I saw were people absorbed in their smartphones and tablets of all shapes and sizes. There was even the awfully named cross breed device called the phablet. Well, it is either a phone or it isn’t and, anyway, I think it would be much more fun to call it a tablerone. The latest National Readership Survey (NRS) estimates that 53% of British adults now use a smartphone and 31% use a tablet, with the latter enjoying an incredible 246% increase in just 12 months.

by Charlotte Henry, 17/05/2013

Yahoo! will integrate Twitter into its news frontpage, continuing its battle to be relevant in the social age. Certain tweets will now be included amongst the aggregated news headlines, although it’s not yet clear how they will be selected.

by Jonathan Staines, 16/05/2013

My three-year old daughter has discovered swearing. Three-year old style swearing. Somehow she has discovered that ‘poo’ is different from other words and so occasionally, when you ask what she’d like for tea or what she wants on her toast, she’ll tell you ‘poo’. And then she waits for a reaction. She knows there should be one.

by Charlotte Henry, 16/05/2013

It’s been a good few days for YouTube sensations. After Commander Hadfield was a Space Oddity, the latest thing to go viral across the web is a video of Abercrombie and Fitch clothing being given to homeless people in the US.

by Victoria Fox, 16/05/2013

Personalisation is endemic in marketing at the moment. From Coca Cola’s new names on bottles, ‘Share a Coke’ campaign, to Starbucks’ insistence on writing our names (and is it just me or is it always the wrong name?) on our chai tea lattes. It seems we’re not allowed to buy a drink now unless we’re prepared to get personal.

Five ways to tell if your streamed music service is radio …or why Google’s All Access ISN’T “Radio without rules”! External website

by Mark Barber, 16/05/2013

The news this morning is that Google is launching a music streaming subscription service called Google Play Music All Access to compete with the likes of Spotify and Microsoft’s Xbox Music. Initially to launch in the US, the Android based service will soon be rolled out in the UK and other countries.

by Gemma Charles, 16/05/2013

Tesco’s UK Twitter feed is the best in the world for social customer care, according to a survey by social analytics expert Socialbakers.

The company found that despite having almost 80,000 followers, @UKTesco answers 65% of user questions in an average of 81 minutes in its survey for Q1.

by @gordonmacmillan, 16/05/2013

Nice idea here from the Guardian to celebrate reaching the Twitter milestone of one million followers. To mark the occasion it wants to find out more about its followers and where they are tweeting from.

by Sue Unerman, 16/05/2013

So one of football’s managerial greats has gone. Ferguson’s era is finally over.

The BBC’s chief football writer Phil McNulty sums him up in three words here “Charismatic, explosive, contrary”. It is the latter that explains his brilliance for me. Sir Alex has never acted as he was “supposed to”. When Wayne Rooney first threatened to quit, back in 2010, Ferguson created a reality-changing “Truth Turning Point” (a pivotal moment in communications that “defies every convention .. and gets the audience to the truth quickly and easily”), which I examined in detail in my book. McNulty goes on: “Love him or hate him, football in general and Man United in particular will be poorer for his departure.” Of course he is hated as well as loved. Which is characteristic for non-conformists and explains why there isn’t a richer pool of non-conformists out there.

by @gordonmacmillan, 16/05/2013

YouTube’s first comedy week is shaping up to be a major event and it is being backed by a string of ads including a spot with Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The movie star takes a moment or two to remind the world that he is a “a big fan of comedy” as we get a few ‘Terminator’ moments and an encounter with a group doing the Harlem Shake.

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