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Nine website metrics for zero landfill waste | Part 1 of 2

The car industry is caught between a rock and the proverbial hard place.

Petrol is now seen as horrible and polluting … not only is it responsible for pumping ever more carbon dioxide, the world’s top cause of global warming, into the air but the particulate emissions are being linked to everything from asthma to cancer and are making cities progressively unhealthy.

Of course you can go electric, but that’s not much better.  There is a growing body of evidence that the manufacture of electric cars is more environmentally damaging than petrol, and no-one’s yet figured out how to dispose of the toxic lithium batteries e-vehicles rely upon.

However there are some things the car industry’s doing right, and one of those is waste.

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Social Media Advertising Revenues Skyrocket in the United States

social media advertisingWhile marketers continue to try to find the best ways to target consumers through social media and how to access metrics to calculate true ROI from social media marketing initiatives, the ambiguities around the social media industry haven’t deterred brands from investing in social media ads. According to forecasts from BIA/Kelsey, U.S. social media ad revenues are projected to increase from $4.6 billion in 2012 to $9.2 billion in 2016. That’s an impressive compound annual growth rate of 19.2%.

For the purposes of its projections, BIA/Kelsey defines social media advertising as, “money spent on advertising formats across social networks.” Social media advertising includes social display advertising as well as native social ad formats, which the company defines as, “branded content integrated within a social network experiences (e.g., the newsfeed or content stream).”

Social Media Ad Revenue Growth Projections

BIA/Kelsey forecasts that spending on social display advertising will increase to $5.4 billion in 2016 (up from $3 billion in 2012 and representing a 15.2% compound annual growth rate). Spending on social display advertising is expected to do even better growing from $1.5 billion in 2012 to $3.9 billion in 2016 (compound annual growth rate of 26%).

Local social media advertising will grow at an even faster compound annual growth rate of 28% driving revenue up from $1.1 billion in 2012 to $3 billion in 2016. However, mobile social advertising will experience the greatest growth of all social media ad revenues with a 28.5% compound annual growth rate. That growth will bring mobile social ad revenue up from $500 million in 2012 to $1.5 billion in 2016.

What’s Behind Social Media Ad Revenue Growth?

The growth of social media ad revenues that is expected to occur during the next four years can be attributed to a variety of factors but BIA/Kelsey identifies several primary drivers in its U.S. Local Media Forecast report:

  • The ongoing development of native ads like Facebook Sponsored Stories and Twitter Promoted Tweets along with higher premiums for those ad units.
  • The rapid growth of mobile monetization.
  • The acceleration of social-mobile consumer usage.
  • The continued experimentation by advertisers and social media vendors.

Is your brand testing social media advertising? An integrated approach that leverages all social ad formats for experimentation (including mobile) is extremely important right now, and based on these projections, if you’re not already experimenting, your brand is already behind.

Image: Channelship Web Agency

Rebranding for ITV Brings a New Logo Design

ITV is trying to find its positioning in the U.K. television market, and a new logo is the first visual element of its recent rebranding effort. In an effort to get away from the conservative logo that has been used since 2006, ITV launched a new colorful logo in a cursive typeface that the company hopes will make the brand seem friendlier. You can see the old and new logos below.

itv logo old and new

The rebranding will affect all of ITV’s properties and will give each its own “big channel idea” as Andrew Laughlin of Digital Spy reports. For example, ITV2 will become the “home of infectious entertainment” and ITV3 will be the “keeper of ITV’s treasured and timeless drama.” ITV4 will become the “home of sport and cult classics” or “the man club.” CITV will get its own version of the new logo which will be, “yellowy-orange with playful idents that burp and fart and do other things kids love.”

You can see some of the applications of the new logo design below.

itv logo screen application

itv logo screen application 2

The strategy behind the rebranding was explained in a press release that accompanied the logo launch last week:

“In an ever more crowed market place, both domestically and internationally, the need for a modern, flexible brand identity that connects with our viewers and customers has never been more important. We are really excited to soon be unveiling a new identity that is as up-to-date, and relevant as our content. Big, bold and creatively ambitious, it will be true to our DNA as a brand at the heart of popular culture.”

The new logo forms the basis of all ITV’s branding domestically and internationally, and is a warm, bold design based on a formalised version of human handwriting, comprising of five colours, in its static state.

When the logo appears on coloured background, such as marketing images for ITV programmes – it will adapt and change according to the background colour scheme of the image. This colour picking technique means that the logo can be dynamic, shifting tone along with the content, reflecting and blending with the mood of different shows.

Within the ITV broadcast business, the family of UK channels will all have a new on-air look, with ITV2, ITV3, ITV4, and CiTV receiving new colour schemes, clearer brand propositions, and accompanying updated brand identities.

To strengthen affinity between the overall brand, and the network’s flagship channel – ITV1 from January 2013 will be known as simply, ITV.

Constituent sub brands within the ITV main channel will also receive new on-air brand identities and colour schemes, such as ITV News and ITV Sport; and the ITV Player and online estate will also be rebranded.

Overall, this rebranding effort seems to be a positive change. Entertainment brands, particularly television networks, have been moving toward this type of fluid and flexible logo design in recent years, and the ITV rebranding should help to position it against its closest competitors.

What do you think? Leave a comment and share your thoughts on the ITV rebranding and new logo design.

Amazon Brand Pages Launched Ahead of Holiday Shopping Season

Amazon brand pages are here and just in time for the holiday shopping season. As part of the new Amazon Marketing Services, brands can use free self-service tools to encourage consumers to learn about brands and buy products through dedicated landing pages (Amazon Pages). Brands can also share social content to existing and prospective customers using Amazon Posts, and tracking performance is available using Amazon Analytics.

Amazon offers three page templates so brands can choose the best design to reach its customers depending on current marketing goals. For example, a brand could showcase a wide variety of products, emphasize posts to hype a specific message, event, or product line, or use a template that blends social media along with a group of products.

While it might seem like just one more online destination that brands have to manage, Amazon Pages actually offer great benefits to brands. First, they’re free and easy to use. Second, they integrate seamlessly with Amazon making one-click purchasing through a site consumers are already comfortable with extremely simple. Third, they allow brands to marry product images and descriptions with social content. Amazon hopes that the Amazon Pages benefits and features will out-perform similar offerings from Facebook.

For brands that sell on Amazon, creating an Amazon Page seems like a must-try opportunity. Keep in mind, this is the first iteration of Amazon Pages, and more features are sure to be added in the future. Already, Amazon has teased about giving brands insight into their audiences’ shopping behaviors, which would be huge for brands to improve marketing ROI. Additional online buzz has already started about the introduction of “buy” buttons in Amazon Posts that also appear when those posts are published on Facebook.

How does Amazon benefit from Amazon Pages? Tim Peterson of Adweek explains that Amazon Pages will deepen the relationships between Amazon and retailers. Since Amazon is a competitor for many retail brands, giving them official branded landing pages on Amazon should help to reduce the amount of cannibalization from resellers. Some large retailers already have Amazon brand stores, so Amazon Pages seem like a natural next step.

You can get all of the details about Amazon Brand Pages here and find the user guide, user agreement, and content guidelines here.

What do you think of Amazon Brand Pages? Does your brand have an Amazon Page yet?

New angles on responsible CSR communication

Ages ago I bookmarked an article on the Ibero-American CSR Blog about how the media engage with CSR.

The guts of the article come from the book La Responsabilidad Social en América Latina (Social Responsibility in Latin America) by Mercedes Korin, founder of the Argentinian firm Mapeo de Promotores de RSE.

In the book Mercedes highlights how the media tend to be uncritical in their coverage of CSR, celebrating practices which are responsible and sustainable and tending to ignore those which are irresponsible and unsustainable.

There’s a very close relationship between PR and the media and while all journalists will tell you they report fact fairly and without bias, the reality is that much of the business news agenda is driven by companies seeking to portray themselves in the best possible light.

So yes the media probably should be more critical of business activities, but a business should also be more self critical … more aware of how its policies and procedures affect its staff and stakeholders and how analytical it is being of its own behaviour.

In order to encourage this kind of analysis within the the media, Mercedes suggests four areas which should be addressed and they form the basis for the four angles I mention below.

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Turning Interns into Recruits

Great internships can make great people and the difference in attitude between your average undergraduate before and after eight weeks in industry is remarkable. Quality internships don’t just give students a flavour of the working world, they can really bring out attributes that are indispensable to large companies and, if you’ve invested time and money in your intern, it makes sense that you want to keep hold of them!

Once a good intern leaves and goes back to the world of university, though, they are back at the mercy of the graduate recruitment rush and a good portion of interns move elsewhere when they finally graduate. So, save from offering them a job, how can you make sure you turn interns into recruits?

Keep them Working

Over an eight or twelve week period it’s quite likely that your intern will have got involved with an ongoing project or perhaps even started up something new of their own. Don’t let that go to waste; why not keep your intern working remotely? Social media and marketing initiatives can easily be run remotely and students will be glad to keep a tie with their potential new employer.

Use them as Recruiters

One clever way of keeping an intern interested is to ask them to help you in finding the next batch of recruits. Interns can be involved in writing web copy to attract students like themselves and at careers fairs and events. Of course, this does rely on there being something at the other end for the student so make sure you’re appropriately rewarding their efforts.

Keep in Touch

Communication between managers and juniors is sometimes tough, but before your intern leaves it’s important to ensure a lasting connection. The exit interview is a vital tool to gauge your intern’s expectations and aspirations going forward, but it’s not enough on its own. If you’re really interested in keeping an intern, make sure you stay in good contact online and don’t be afraid to talk business; a good intern will be more than happy to know he or she is wanted back.

The hardest thing about turning interns into recruits is making sure you keep them engaged. Staying silent for eight months won’t endear your interns to your way of working so make sure you’re using all the right tools to keep them interested. Ideally, giving your interns remote responsibility is a great way of keeping them active, but if that’s not possible you should use all the online tools you can to stay in touch.