The Grosvenor House Hotel in Park Lane is a vision of glamour and grandeur. It was a beautiful, sunny afternoon as the attendees of the Performance Marketing Awards congregated outside the entrance to meet friends and colleagues last Tuesday, the 7th of May. Everyone had made an effort with their formal attire and the ladies impressed in a mixture of stylish outfits. Champagne flowed and soon, we were gestured into the great hall to a 3 course meal before the awards took place. It’s amazing that a room so big could look so crowded, full of innovative and creative people, all hoping that their hard work has paid off!
As the award ceremony started and the categories were swiftly read out, it really hits you that you are potentially going to have to walk up on stage and collect an award on behalf of your team. Both an exciting, yet nervy feeling, waiting to hear the winners.
The awards really give the creative talent and intelligent digital marketers of this industry a chance to shine. The award submissions are challenging and time consuming, so it’s a great achievement for Arena to have been shortlisted for all 4 submitted awards. We came highly commended for ‘Best Agency’ and for ‘Best Brand Engagement Campaign’ with Squawka for Domino’s Pizza. We were up against the likes of Starcom MediaVest, Mindshare and MEC. The affiliate team are proud to be highly commended, though the winner of this award, 7things Media, managed to retain this award for the third year running.
One of our campaigns was recognised as a winner: the award for ‘Most incremental Performance Marketing Campaign’ was submitted by Topcashback and their work with Domino’s Pizza.
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The weather had a greater economic impact on local UK tourism in 2012 than the Olympics. Holiday budgets are still constrained this year but people are planning more short breaks. Everything we think we know about the future of travel is wrong!
The so awaited Travel Seminar, organized by Arena at the fabulous Soho Hotel, hosted a grateful number of travel professionals last Thursday. From tour operators to travel journalists and art gallery directors, all attendees mingled with new industry contacts and enjoyed the five fascinating talks.
The morning opened with Simon Calder, senior travel editor at The Independent. His photographic tour of his enviable journeys around the world got the whole audience alive, expectant about the enormous change in the way we travel. According to Simon, “British Airways is turning into Easyjet and Easyjet is turning into British Airways”.
Bernard Donoghue, Director at ALVA, gave very remarkable insights in the UK inbound and domestic tourism, such as “London receives more visitors from Jersey than from the whole of China”. Although 17 out of the 20 most visited London attractions have free areas, Brits tend to spend a lot of money on museums and art exhibitions, especially temporary expositions, gift shops and cafeterias.
The way the emotional side of our brain works when it comes to making travel related decisions was very precisely explained by Justin Gibbons, Creative Director at Arena, and his colleague Mark Holden, Head of Futures. As human beings, we use a system of emotional tags to categorize the large number of marketing messages we receive every day. According to Justin, “higher emotional states result in more vivid memories”.
To finish up, Ed Cox, our Head of Digital, exposed some remarkable user experience examples to convert ‘lookers’ to bookers. Ed talked about the importance of removing barriers during the customer’s journey. If you take remember just one thing from his presentation, it should be “don’t get in the way of the checkout”. That’s why he recommends asking customers to register once they have made the purchase.
For every £100 spent on acquiring web visitors, £1 is spent on converting them. No wonder that the average conversion rate of travel websites is only 1.45%! With all our expertise, Arena can’t wait to change these figures.
This week Google rolled out a new look for their search results, giving users a green drop-down next the search snippet (see the screenshot below). Here you will find an option to view the cached, or saved view of the page and similar pages in Google’s index. If you are logged in to Google a further option is available, a shortcut to share this page with your Google+ network.
As part of this change, users will no longer see the Instant Preview of the web page on the right-hand side; a feature launched in November 9th 2010 that resulted in “5% [of users being] more likely to be satisfied with the results they click.” Interesting finding, but not enough to save Instant Previews once Google looked to streamline the page, citing “low usage” of the feature.
Instant Previews were a useful indicator of technical crawling issues, so it’s a pity to loose this
feature. While you can still check Google’s previews within Google Webmaster Tools, you are restricted to your verified domain. So no more peeking on competitors or prospects.
The most significant impact here is the tighter integration with Google’s emerging social platform, Google+. A trend we have already seen across Gmail and YouTube, as Google leverages its existing technology and audience to drive up usage. When Larry Page became CEO of the compay in 2011, he tied 25% of employee bonuses to the success of Google’s new social strategy; these integrations are the fruit of this commitment. With 500m+ users and reports that Google+ has recently overtaken Twitter – it’s never been a more important time to consider this platform within your marketing strategy.
Yesterday, a few of us attended Newsworks Shift 2013, where we heard some leading people in the news and media industry – including our very own Justin – discuss the shifts the classically offline medium has made to embrace digital user behaviour.
Among the speakers was Joanna Geary, the Guardian’s Social & Communities Editor, who unveiled the launch of the Guardian’s new collaboration platform GuardianWitness.
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There are plenty of successful compilations on YouTube showing mankind failing and being awesome, but it was only with the Harlem Shake meme explosion that I noticed how a lot of people make money with other people’s creativity.
The HS compilations appeared about a week after the original video was uploaded. Soon, replications of the meme reached the level that even the keyword “compilation” became a meme by itself – with variations like “compilation (best videos)”, “best/funniest”, “top 10″, “ultimate” and so on…
It’s all about maths and magic: if 3 minutes is the ideal length for a video and there are plenty of 10-second videos, why not compile around 18 videos and get more views than all the originals combined?
After the meteorite fell in Russia, I started the Unimpressed Driver meme with 5 different versions and one compilation video.
After more than a month, the results clearly support my theory:
The compilation had more views than all the other videos in total.
In a world that is more connected than ever, it seems the famous formula to “divide and conquer” became outdated.
Like the start of most new jobs, my first day or two at Arena was mostly a struggle to remember a veritable myriad of passwords and names, but once all that was out of the way, I was able to sink my teeth into the role of graduate analyst.
It’s a little unusual working for an agency whose bread and butter is planning and buying media when you’re not responsible for either of those things, but I’m baffled by the sheer breadth of activities I’ve been involved in already. One minute you’re sifting through data, finding juicy chunks of information about the client’s consumer. Then, at a moment’s notice, you’re doing undercover user experience research and getting sized up by security as a shoplifter with self-doubt.
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On Thursday, Facebook announced their long rumoured Facebook Phone – Facebook Home. It is not a handset or a new OS like some suspected but a family of apps that sits on Android and consequentially transforms your Android device into a Facebook Phone. It is called Facebook Home.
Mark Zuckerberg seemed pretty excited when revealing this product; it is certainly the biggest mobile experiment Facebook has done so far and it shows that they are “Mobile First”.
The main idea behind it is that we use phones to interact with people, but our phones are built around the apps. They say: why not flip this idea around and make phones designed around people not apps?
In practice, once you install Facebook Home on your device, your screen will show you high-resolution updates from your friends called Coverfeed. It means you can get updates from your friends without logging into an app or even unlocking your phone.
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In advance of the 2013 Grand National, we at Arena decided to see if Social Media could predict the winner or, more importantly, the punter interest in each runner — which may indicate the winner.
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