Happy's marketing news - 06.10.17
It’s been a busy week in the marketing world, here’s what has caught our eye!
A report released this week by the Northern Powerhouse Partnership says the Government must invest more than £3bn in the region, to create 850k jobs. It believes a “Digital North” operation should be established to look at access to finance and promote economic growth. This would include a £30m fund for tech start-ups; better using money allocated through the British Business Bank; and the ultra-fast roll out of pilots across the North with full fibre connectivity and a 5G network. The Powerhouse 2050 report also calls for the creation of a Northern Centre of Excellence for Civic Computation.
Men working for the BBC earn an average of 9.3% more than women, according to a report into staff pay at the Corporation. This compares with a UK average of 18% and Director General Tony Hall said the report showed the BBC was “in a better place than many organisations”, although Michelle Stanistreet, General Secretary of the NUJ, responded that the gap was still “too large” and that the BBC “should lead the way on fairness and transparency on pay”. The report follows a row over star salaries that revealed most of the top-earning presenters at the BBC were men. Lord Hall has pledged to close the pay gap by 2020 and said the Corporation should be “an exemplar of what can be achieved when it comes to pay, fairness, gender and representation”.
Marie Curie has still not returned to advertising on YouTube after being caught up in the brand safety scandal earlier this year because despite the work the platform has done to make it safer for brands to advertise it “doesn’t allow” the charity’s ad verification technology. Speaking on a panel at the Festival of Marketing, Steve Armstrong, head of digital at Marie Curie, said: “We realise the changes that have been made and the new tools you can use to be a bit more selective on content you appear on, but as a charity we have to be as fastidious as we can be in order to deliver the lens of trust we need to.”
Charities are only spending a fraction of their advertisement budgets on internet advertising despite the medium accounting for almost half of all advertising expenditure in the UK, new research from the consultancy nfpSynergy shows. The research, which is based on data from Statista, the Advertising Association and the information company Nielsen, shows that the proportion of charities’ advertising spending that goes online has doubled from 2.5 per cent in 2011 to 5 per cent in 2016. But in comparison, overall spending on online advertising has grown from 29.7 per cent of the UK’s total advertising spend in 2011 to 46.2 per cent last year, the research shows.
If you’re a fan of Instagram or Facebook Stories – posts of photos and videos which automatically disappear after 24 hours – you’ll now be able to send to both platforms with a single post. In a feature currently rolling out to Instagram users, there’s a new Share option when posting a story which says “Your Facebook Story”. Check that, and it will be automatically cross-posted to Facebook Stories …
