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Rooster has been appointed by MOBKOI, a premium mobile marketing company, to build brand and product awareness in the UK. Rooster’s brief is to build awareness among UK media, including marketing, advertising and business trade publications.
James Brooke, managing director at Rooster PR, said: “We’re looking forward to giving MOBKOI the platform and the audience to showcase their innovative, ultra-premium campaigns.”
MOBKOI has an exclusive agreement with upday, a personalised news app run by Axel Springer and Samsung Electronics, and a client of Rooster’s since April 2016.
Quentin Le Pape, CEO and co-founder of MOBKOI, added: “Since launching two years ago, we’ve experienced incredible growth, and with so many exciting new projects in the pipeline, including our exclusive partnership with upday, we’re thrilled to have Rooster’s expertise and enthusiasm to help us get the word out.”
Diane Scott, director of media and corporate affairs at Visa Europe, discusses how she convinced a new CEO that her comms team was a valuable asset to the business, during the AMEC summit 2016.
In June 2014, Scott had just joined Visa in her current director role. Speaking at the summit, she described how it was important to impress her new senior management, and how she was faced with the big questions from her CEO. She recalls how questions at the time included, “How do I know anything you’re doing is getting a share of voice (in the industry)?” and “How do we know this coverage is doing anything for our business?”.
Here are three steps that Scott took to make the most of her budget:
Concentrate on key message delivery
Scott said that her first line of action included working out what key messages the business wanted to project, and how much coverage came down to the work of her teams.
She said that the first step was to find a reliable media partner, in this case Gorkana, and work on getting the message right – which took three or four months of discussions and testing. She added: “It takes a long time to work out what the key message is. It took a few months to get it absolutely right.”
The second step for Scott involved getting various comms teams and agencies also working within the business to report all of their actions, and report this back to Gorkana to identify how much was being projected by the Visa teams.
Create a framework for a decentralised team
Getting all agency partners and teams reporting back to the main office was a core step to success, according to Scott. She now provides all teams with an international report and framework. She added: “This can promote a sense of competition and help identify problems for specific teams.”
Take time to understand background information
Scott recommends to take time and pay attention to background information for best results. As an example, she found that; while in traditional media outlets Visa’s ‘share of voice’ was large compared to competitors, this was significantly lower in social outlets. This is now an oversight that she would like to review within the company, and ensure that key message delivery is clear throughout media outlets.
In 2015, Scott’s team was awarded the second highest performance rating within the business. She said: “That means you’re up against business units who turn profits and are revenue generating. For a support team to get the second highest rating, I think that’s phenomenal and nothing close to what we were achieving before.
“[Measurement] gave us the ability to have a different sort of conversation and it positioned us as people who were business savvy.”
Way To Blue has this week launched a new dedicated global influencer business called iN, which aims to drive brand advocacy for its clients through a real-time tracking tool called ‘iN-dex’.
Picture courtesy of comedian and youtuber KSI (pictured with Sacha Baron Cohen)
With a six-strong global influencer panel, iN will look to build its service on “meaningful relationships” with influencers, as well as build multi-platform programmes integrated across paid, owned and earned media.
Clients already in place include Amazon and YO! Sushi, Sony and Studio Canal. The new business will operate with influencers across a range of consumer categories, from entertainment and food and drink to family, gaming, music, health and fitness.
Make-up artist and “influencer” Laura Jenkinson said: “I have been working and collaborating with Way To Blue for over a year now and the team are extremely professional. The projects are wide and varied, and while always complimenting my own brand, they always know what will work and what won’t. I love seeing an email pop up from them in my inbox!”
Way To Blue CEO Adam Rubins said: “True influence drives action and not just awareness. Having a large Twitter or blog following doesn’t inherently make a person influential and a lot of influencers have their own agenda, so it’s sometimes hard to get the attention of these in-demand luminaries.
“Too many agencies are also confusing clients out there with the common misconception that social influencers only appeal to a younger audience. There’s a whole raft of bloggers, vloggers, instagrammers and viners who cater to an older audience. Whether it’s parenting or motoring, food to engineering – there’s a social influencer out there for all of us!”
iN-dex services will include influencer marketing strategy, campaign management, content creation, talent management and measurement.
Tricker will produce the organisation’s monthly member’s magazine, Women Together – writing, editing and designing the 32-page magazine, which circulates to SWI members across Scotland.
Women Together, which was previously produced in-house, has been outsourced so as to address a deficit in magazine production costs, and to give the magazine a new lease of life.
Christine Hutton, national chairman of the SWI, said: “Our members are already noticing that the content and overall look and feel of the magazine is different, and they are very much enjoying the changes that have been made.”
In 1999, 143,000 copies of Women Together were printed annually, but by 2016 this had dropped to 60,000, due in part to a fall in membership numbers. It is hoped that fresh content will help to halt that decline, increase circulation and attract advertisers.
Beverley Tricker, managing director of Tricker PR, said: “We have a track record in producing ad hoc and quarterly client publications, but this contract leads us a step further into producing a glossy magazine and also organising the distribution to all parts of Scotland.”
Kicking off the first session at AMEC 2016, Omar Mahmoud, chief of marketing knowledge, private fundraising & partnerships division at UNICEF, discusses how comms professionals can use three lessons from football performance measurements and apply them to your business strategy.
While speaking on the first day of the AMEC summit, Mahmoud said that ‘football is a metaphor for life’ as the passion, emotion and dedication of the game is something that we all deal with every day.
He says football performance measurement stats, such as those created by SoccerSTATS, has taught us three things:
Create a framework
Sports measurement has steadily evolved since the introduction of analytics to baseball by baseball icon Yogi Berrer. Since then, football has steadily developed these methods of analysis such as the FIFA/Coca-Cola World Ranking.
Mahmoud said that it’s also useful to have an overreaching and broad measure in comms, so long as businesses know the drivers of that measure. He added that it’s also important to consistently update these frameworks.
Be aware of ‘ignorance management’
Mahmoud said that we are all aware of knowledge management, but comms professionals should also be aware of ‘ignorance management’ – the case where businesses are so focused on the obvious, or easily available stats, that real important information can be missed as a result.
In the case of the Ballon d’Or, or the European Footballer of the Year award, Mahmoud says that only one defender has ever received it. This is because most of the obvious candidates are strikers, who tend to goal scorers and make for an easier measurement. Despite this, Mahmoud says when you look deeper at the data, the goal defended, or the goal stopped, is often more valuable for a winning team.
Study your competitor
Mahmoud says that we all have an ‘action bias’ in our business decisions. An analysis was taken of 300 goalkeepers’ penalty habits, which found that the best thing a goalkeeper could do was stay in the goal’s centre. However, most goal keepers tend to jump to one side. Why? Because most of our behaviour is psychological and we are reactive by nature.
Mahmoud says the best thing to do is study your competitor as much as possible. In 2008’s UEFA final between Manchester United and Chelsea, econometrics was a big part of the game. Chelsea managers had made friends with a university econometrician, who found that Manchester United’s goalkeeper always leaned to the left when trying to save. Chelsea players repeatedly tried to take advantage of this during the game. This, Mahmoud says, is an example of studying your competitor.
Redleaf Communications, part of Porta Communications, has promoted Amy Williams to associate director in the company’s professional and financial services team.
Amy Williams
Williams joined Redleaf as account director in early 2015, after a US role with Aspectus and, previously, Montieth & Company. Her specialist sectors include banking, fintech, alternative finance, private equity and investment management.
Charles Ansdell, managing director, financial services at Redleaf, said: “Amy has demonstrated the ability to direct multiple accounts while providing invaluable strategic advice to our clients. Her strong business acumen, coupled with international expertise, has proved beneficial to clients and colleagues alike. Her promotion is richly deserved.
“Redleaf is going from strength-to-strength and, with the development of a robust senior team, we look forward to Amy continuing to play an important role supporting our new business initiatives and delivering for our clients.”
On the first morning of the AMEC Summit 2016, David Rockland, partner and CEO at Ketchum Global Research & Analytics, looks forward to the next two days of the conference and tomorrow’s launch of a new Integrated Measurement Framework.
Hotwire has appointed Jamie Readon as its new creative director, with a brief to help the agency deliver more integrated campaigns.
Jamie Readon
With more than 15 years’ experience in advertising, marketing, online and broadcasting, Readon has created digital, social, and broadcast campaigns for the likes of Universal Studios, Nissan, BSkyB, Cadbury, Ubisoft and Google.
He has worked for advertising agencies including Digitas, Freeform London, Ogilvy and BBH.
Sitting within the agency’s dedicated innovation team, Hotwire Labs, Readon has been briefed to deliver creative and integrated campaign ideas for Hotwire’s roster of clients, which includes Travelex and Intel Security.
Hotwire’s UK MD, Matt Cross, said: “Jamie’s energy and passion for idea generation is undeniably infectious. Combine this with his strong conceptual thinking, and you can understand why we are excited for Jamie to be joining our team.
“Harnessing his raw talent and incredible experience working with some of the biggest global brands gives us the potential to deliver even bolder, more creative and integrated campaigns to our clients.”
Readon added: “Joining Hotwire is an incredibly exciting next chapter for me. Traditional PR is slowly becoming a thing of the past, with clients demanding more integrated campaigns to build their brands and communicate with their audiences.
“I’m thrilled to be part of an agency which is committed to delivering game-changing, integrated campaigns and see it as a great opportunity to further build on the fantastically creative ideas the team at Hotwire already develops.”
In Gorkana’s exclusive video interview with John Croll, CEO at iSentia, John shares his expectations for the 2016 AMEC Summit and discusses the talks he is most looking forward to. He also explains why metrics matter so much to his organisation.
The Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communication (AMEC) is holding its annual International Summit in London this week (15-16 June). You can read, watch and follow highlights from the summit this week on Gorkana news
Ahead of going on stage to welcome delegates to this year’s AMEC Summit 2016, Myles Johnson, UK MD of Gorkana, reveals why it’s set to be the biggest and best AMEC Summit to date and why metrics can help comms professionals #PRove their value.
Rooster’s brief is to build awareness among UK media, including marketing, advertising and business trade publications.
