Advertising Standards Authority Expand Authority to Online Space
September 2, 2010
The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) is the U.K.’s independent regulator of advertising across all media, including TV, internet, sales promotions and direct marketing. The ASA’s mission is to ensure ads are legal, decent, honest and truthful by applying the Advertising Codes.
According to an article from the BBC today, the ASA will expand its power to apply its Advertising Codes to online ads beginning March 1, 2011. Additionally, the ASA will have the power to ban marketing messages from social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.
The ASA’s power will only apply to websites, online ads and online messages that are intended to sell products and services, so online publishers and journalists will not be subject to the ASA’s oversight. The BBC article noted that 75% of complaints to the ASA are related to misleading messages in ads, and beginning in March 2011, not only will the ASA have to power to restrict and ban online ads that are found to be misleading, but they’ll also have the right to purchase ad space themselves advertising other companies’ non-compliance with ASA standards.
For brands that are used to practicing truth-in-advertising and don’t mislead consumers, the new ASA reach to the online advertising space should be welcome. Now, advertisers will be placed on a level playing field in terms of assertions and claims. However, the online space is very, very big, and the ASA won’t be able to catch all advertisers who disregard the standards. This is a step in the right direction though, and consumers should benefit from it.
You can follow the link to read more about the ASA’s newly extended authority in the digital space. While most consumers are likely to be happy about the ASA’s announcement, there will undoubtedly be some people who believe this kind of regulation and oversight in the online space is unwelcome and excessive. What do you think? Leave a comment and share your thoughts as a consumer and as a business person.
Necessity is the Mother of Reinvention
August 27, 2010
There are lots of reasons why a company might choose to rebrand:
- increasing globalisation leading to confusion in the minds of customers
- acquisition or merger of two companies – or a spinoff – necessitating a change
- significant change to the business – products, services, direction, scale…
- the need to differentiate from competitors
- occasionally as a result of a crisis
- and no doubt there are more…
Such a big change isn’t usually decided on a whim, but is driven by necessity. And corporate brand metamorphosis certainly isn’t easy. It would definitely be worth getting some expert advice!
As always with the Communicate Magazine conferences, the upcoming Transform Conference is intended to help people facing the implementation of such a major project, providing practical ideas and case studies based on the experiences of the line-up of speakers.
For this conference, the speakers are drawn from corporates, governments, charities and corporate advisors, and include: Unilever, Hays, Dave, AkzoNobel, The Co-Op, Aviva, Santander, Holcim and many more.
There will be discussions on communicating the changes internally, on protecting intellectual property, dealing with cultural issues, reputation management, visual identity and fonts, brand architecture and reinvention without damaging brand heritage. It sounds fascinating – the only issue, as always, is choosing between the different streams of discussion.
I’m particularly intrigued by the idea of a history of the world in 1000 fonts, which is the topic to be covered by Bruno Maag of Dalton Maag – brand values and visual identities from the Romans onwards! On the other hand, guidance on how to execute a new visual identity across multiple brand touchpoints in multiple departments across multiple regions sounds essential, and as a former project manager I can imagine just how complex such a programme could be. (This session will be led by Gideon Wilkinson from Endpoint).
I’ll just have to hope that Communicate have decided to video each session. Or that I can find a time-turner before October.
The early bird period for this conference is nearly over, so you’ll have to act fast (before the end of August) if you want to make a saving on the conference fee. It’s going to be at the Hotel Russell, in London, on October 21 – and it’s an all day thing (not surprising, given what they plan to cover). More details here. Looking good!
Brands Turn Heads and Build Business in New York’s Times Square
August 27, 2010
Earlier this week, I wrote a post about brand museums and factories that have become popular tourist destinations. Had I written that post a few years ago, Kellogg’s may have been on it, but the company’s Cereal City USA in Battle Creek, Michigan never drew the attendance levels it needed to survive (it closed in 2007). However, just because Cereal City USA wasn’t a huge hit doesn’t mean that Kellogg’s was ready to give up on creating branded experiences for consumers.
Enter New York City’s Times Square, which has become a brand hot spot over the past decade with more companies investing in unique retail locations there after seeing brands like FAO Schwartz and M&M’s succeed in drawing large crowds. This month, Kellogg’s jumped on the bandwagon by opening a store and cafe dedicated to a brand that has held a place in American pop culture for decades.
Welcome to Pop Tarts World.
Pop Tarts World started off with a bang. Already, 1,500-2,000 consumers visit Pop Tarts World per day where they can buy branded merchandise and taste unique Pop Tarts-inspired menu items. According to BrandWeek, Zeta Interactive has been tracking the performance on Pop Tarts World online, and already positive Pop Tarts brand buzz online has grown from 74% to 88% less than two weeks since the store opened. Furthermore, the Kellogg’s brand has also seen a boost in the positive online buzz of 6%.
And that’s not all. The Pop Tarts Facebook page grew from 1.8 million to 2 million people within two weeks with people not just visiting but also actively joining the conversation, uploading pictures of themselves at Pop Tarts World, and more. The online popularity of Pop Tarts has even surpassed brands like Wheaties, Cheerios, Frosted Flakes, and Quaker Oats — some of the dominant players in the breakfast foods segment in the United States.
Consumers love branded experiences that are either useful or entertaining (or both). Pop Tarts World is a perfect example of an entertaining branded experience. Not only that, but it’s also an example of a branded experience that people can share. Pop Tarts, entertainment, shared experiences that can be shared further through branded social web destinations — it’s a recipe for success.
What do you think? Will you stop into Pop Tarts World next time you’re in midtown Manhattan?
Image: Flickr
Social Media Happens Up North Too
August 26, 2010
I’m allowed to say that, because I’m from Teesside.
I know there are points north of there (I’ve even visited a few) but for many living in the south, anywhere above the Hull/Bristol line is the Frozen North – and there may even be dragons.
So I’m delighted that Communicate Magazine are bringing their very successful Social Media in a Corporate Context to Manchester.
OK, Manchester isn’t very far north, and is less than 2 hours by train from London these days, but it’s a start, right? Next stop Newcastle – or Edinburgh, perhaps.
I’ve been to both SMCC conferences so far, and have thoroughly enjoyed them, so I can wholeheartedly recommend this one.
Iit looks as though there’ll be a return of the excellent Social Media Newsroom X-Factor session, a session on social media reputation management and a debate about crowd-sourcing, as well as a couple of sessions on community development (internal and external), one on engaging Gen-Y, one on crisis comms, and more… Speakers will be from many organisations, including First Direct, Manchester Airport, Boots, VisitBritain, Lloyds TSB, Scania, DHL and the NHS.
Communicate Magazine have also invited Molly Flatt from 1000Heads to talk about word of mouth; as someone who’s been on the receiving end of ‘a hug from a corporate’ via the work of 1000Heads (in another role), I’ll be particularly interested to hear her speak.
For those of you who get a lot out of these conferences (all of you, surely?) there’s a chance to shape next year’s programme to suit your needs, by becoming a Pacesetter now – and you get a second conference seat for free, as well as a year’s subscription to Communicate magazine.
This autumn’s conference is going to be on the 19th October, at the Palace Hotel in central Manchester. More details available on the Communicate Magazine events pages, but if you’re quick, there’s a discount of £50 if you book before 31 August.
So come and visit Manchester! These days Manchester is my closest city (yes, I too have moved south); perhaps see you there?
What Makes for Effective Investor Relations Sites? Part 24: Let Investors See What You’ve Been Talking About
August 24, 2010
I was recently doing some research on company presentations and so I went out to the Internet to look for good examples of that staple of corporate communications, the PowerPoint slide show. If you go to investor conferences, almost every presenting company will accompany its speech with a slide deck illustrating their main points. As any investor can tell you, the slides are often full of very useful information. So when I wanted to look at how companies approached a particular communications issue, I thought it would be a relatively easy thing to go out and pull up the presentations of the various companies and analyze what I was interested in.
s so often proves to be the case these days, my initial presumption was incorrect. It’s not quite so easy to go out on the Internet and find a representative sample of corporate investor presentations. In fact, what I found was quite surprising: in a random sample of 20 U. S. companies, only five companies (25%) posted their investor presentations (excluding quarterly presentations).
This seems like a serious oversight. It’s not as if the companies don’t want to make the information public – it’s already been placed in the public domain at a conference. It doesn’t seem rational that company management would wish to limit the dissemination of the information on the slides only to those attending the investor conference where they were originally shown. I prefer to think that it is more likely to be oversight.
So here’s today’s thought for making your investor website more effective: place a history of your most recent investor presentations at investor conferences on your website. Not everyone can attend the conferences that you present at, yet this is information that you clearly think investors should know, otherwise it wouldn’t be in the slide deck. So let everybody see them. And keep them there for a while, as they serve as a good reference point to company operations and thinking at any particular point in time.
Above is a good example of a complete history of presentations placed in their investor section by Xstrata, the mining company.
This is a relatively simple thing to do and it helps investor transparency. It should be part of every well designed investor site.
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