Happy's marketing news - 08.09.17
It’s been a busy week in the marketing world, here’s what has caught our eye!
Brands using Snapchat to reach teenagers could be misguided according to new research, which finds that only 14 per cent of users aged 16-24 use the app to find new products and brands to try. However, that figure rises to one in five (21 per cent) among users aged 25-34. The findings come on the eve of Snapchat’s fifth birthday in September, and as its parent company reports slowing growth as it looks for ways to make life easier for advertisers. The research was carried out among 2,500 UK consumers aged 16 and above by media agency UM. It forms part of the Momentous Book of Moments, an in-depth study of the UK’s online and social media habits. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the study found that a large part of the social network’s attraction to younger users is its lack of appeal to older people: 40 per cent of those aged 16-24 (and 43 per cent of teenagers) admit they like using Snapchat because their parents aren’t on it. One in five 25-34-year-old users (20 per cent) feel the same way.
First Direct has launched its first major campaign in two years in an attempt to subtly reinforce its “challenger” status. The Leeds-headquartered bank, set up 28 years ago, has brought in London agency Karmarama for an above-the-line campaign that has launched with a 60-second TV ad. It seeks – in a marketplace increasingly featuring challenger banks such as Aldermore, Metro and Atom – to promote it as a “modern, digital bank”. The ad, which features an astronaut bouncing around London, paints First Direct as a bank that “forgot to be ordinary long ago”.
Coca-Cola believes e-commerce is playing an increasingly important role for the business, but warns that its image of only being the remit of digital “pure players” is wrong and should be challenged. Speaking at the Barclays Global Consumer Staples Conference yesterday (5 September), the company’s executive vice president of Coca-Cola North America, Sandy Douglas, spoke about the “digitisation” of the business, and how technology is changing the way it serves consumers. E-commerce, he claimed, gives it the opportunity to reach people using their mobile devices in their homes – and believes there is room for further growth due to the popularity of its products among online retailers. That said, he believes e-commerce still has an image problem that needs tackling.
Gambling firms should be banned from football shirt sponsorship deals, Labour has said. With 25 of the 92 league clubs, including nine out of 20 Premier League sides, currently engaged in such sponsoring, shadow Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) secretary Tom Watson said it was time to take action. Currently, children’s replica kits cannot carry the logos of betting companies, with some choosing to display the emblem of club trusts, or simply selling blank shirts. Mr Watson said clubs should take the lead from the Football Association as it ended its commercial agreement with Ladbrokes in June after deciding it was not appropriate for it to partner with a gambling company. Labour said the FA already prohibits under-18 teams from displaying the logos of gambling firms as that would be classed as wearing clothing which would be deemed as “detrimental to the welfare, health or general interest of young persons”.
Google has redesigned its Street View camera system so that it can take clearer images and capture more data about shops and buildings. The new hardware takes clearer panoramic photos, while two high definition cameras capture detailed images of shops and street signs. Data such as shop opening hours can be spotted by machine-learning algorithms and included in search results. It is the first major update to the Street View hardware in eight years. Google said the improved cameras would produce brighter and more colourful images, with less-noticeable seams where the images had been “stitched together” to produce a 360-degree panorama. It said it had captured images of more than 10 million miles of road, and more than 80 billion photos, since launching Street View, in 2007.
