Peripheral vision is not something we normally think about when designing marketing media, but eye tracking has demonstrated how crucial it really is to their performance. The peripheral field of vision has a significant influence on eye movement and direction, and can be a decisive factor in encouraging readers to maintain engagement in marketing material. So now let’s take a closer look at how it all works and how we can capitalise on it to create more effective communications.

Our visual span broadly consists of three distinctive levels of perception. When you focus on an object you see it in every detail that your eye can distinguish (the fovea), but you will also notice everything in the background, only in gradually decreasing levels of detail towards the edges of your visual span (the parafovea and periphery).

The fovea is the smallest region and is typically used for activities that require high focus, such as reading. But this task would take forever if it weren’t for the parafovea (the area directly surrounding the fovea), which helps us to see the things in close proximity to what we’re already focusing on. It is this mechanism that allows us to read several words on a page rather than one at a time, drastically increasing our reading speed. It also helps us to identify objects in our environment to enhance our awareness, allowing us to focus on anything that catches our eye from the periphery. Read more…

When I first started at Red C it was almost like I had a second language to learn with Email Marketing.  I am in one of the email specialist teams at the agency; our team members have loads of email experience variety of different sectors. I had to learn pretty fast to be able to follow what they were talking about; it felt sometimes like they were talking in code. After a few months of sitting in client meetings and being involved in the email process from concept to build, I feel like I’ve finally got my head around email marketing jargon.

However, gaining this understanding was no easy feat. I had to spend a lot of time trawling through the web for guides that defined some of the technical jargon that was often flung around. Unfortunately, none of the explanations I found were friendly or digestible – they were just too technical and all I wanted was a simple explanation perhaps with an example. That wasn’t too much to ask, was it?

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Running a successful, cost effective PPC advertising campaign takes a lot more than picking some relevant keywords, writing a bit of clever ad copy then sitting back and watching the results come in. If you want to pull together a successful, competitor-proof campaign, it requires a bit of sound strategic thinking…

The importance of measuring pay-per-click campaigns

Back in the summer of 2011, we created a series of Pay-Per-Click campaigns for a well-known Pub and Restaurant brand, with a chain of over 130+ pubs. The main objective of our ads was to drive as much web traffic as possible at the lowest Cost Per Click. So we set about researching the most relevant search terms and cost effective keywords and wrote persuasive ad copy with messages relating to the most popular pub deals of the week, e.g. Sunday Roasts, Lunch and Evening Meal Deals.

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According to the latest figures from Experian, December has proved to be the biggest online Christmas ever in the UK. As you get back to your desk after a few days off, I’m sure you will have a priority list of things to do in January on your digital and email marketing campaigns. One thing that should be a high priority for email marketers is a thorough review of last year’s performance and an email design MOT. Here are ten best practice email techniques we uncovered from eye tracking studies last year that can help you squeeze extra clicks out of your email programme.

1.     Make a good first impression

Recipients open your emails for a myriad of different reasons. Make sure that your opening screen caters for them all. Crucially, offer good navigation links for ‘purposeful’ openers, who already have something in mind, and use good content to ‘open the conversation’ with those in a browsing mode.

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When it comes to social media campaigns that catch the eye and tickle creative sensibilities, we’ve been spoilt for choice in 2012. In addition to innovative campaigns like Blu Dot’s ‘Musical Chairs’ or seamlessly integrated above-the-line and digital campaigns like Walkers’ ‘What’s That Flavour?’, there have been technological advances too. We’ve seen the introduction of Shazam in TV ads from Cadbury and Argos – the former using a track to entice the social-media-savvy Britain’s Got Talent crowd to enter their online competition, the latter using the app to cement their new market positioning as a digital retailer. We’ve even seen some head-turning Pinterest campaigns, notably from BMI, Guess Jeans and UNICEF. In short, 2012 has been a virtual smorgasboard of social media delights. Here are three tasty picks for you to savour… Read more…

So another year draws to an end, and now’s the time you start looking back at the things that made it memorable. Naturally, being a self-confessed advertising nerd, some of the best moments of this year came in the form of the brilliant advertising campaigns I saw. The ads that made me instantly think ‘awww, I wish I’d done that’. That happened quite a few times in 2012, but I managed to narrow those moments down to five. Take a look below and see if you agree with my selection!
Favourite TV advertising campaign of 2012

From John Lewis’ time travelling ‘Never Knowingly Undersold’ to Paddy Power’s ‘Chav Tranquiliser’, there were lots of TV commercials that grabbed my attention this year. But for me, none of them came close to DirecTV’s hilarious Death by Cable campaign. Why? Because they made loads of TV spots, and they all managed to be hilarious – and that’s some accomplishment.
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It’s YouTube marketing, but not as we know it. I’m not talking about those annoying ads at the start of videos, whose “You can skip to video in 5 seconds” button we can’t help but hammer-click until it finally takes us to what we really want to watch. Or even ad banners, video adverts or viral videos. This YouTube marketing is more a type of product placement, or even celebrity endorsement, where YouTubers (people who film themselves and upload videos to YouTube) recommend everything from mascara to coconut water to their impressionable followers.

Making you beautiful

The most popular genre of YouTube endorsement is beauty videos from self-styled “beauty gurus”. These beauty gurus, some of whom attract hundreds of thousands of followers, film and upload various types of help videos to their ‘vlog’ channels. These vlogs include a wide range of beauty and fashion topics including tips on makeup for different occasions, nail and hair tutorials to OOTD (outfit of the day) videos, product reviews and clothes hauls. Some even post vlogs and TAG (question and answer) videos, which allow the viewer to get even closer to the YouTuber. By getting an insight into a day in their personal life of these beauty gurus, a virtual relationship is fostered between vlogger and subscriber – creating the perfect conditions for successful product endorsement.

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What is WordPress?

WordPress is a free, web-based content management system that was designed to allow anyone build and maintain a website or blog. It was originally intended as a way of writing and publishing blog articles but due to the ease and flexibility of WordPress, it has also become a platform for developing websites as well. Since its creation in 2003, it has grown to be the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on millions of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day. WordPress describes itself as both free and priceless at the same time, we take a look at what it has to offer if you want to use it to create your own SEO friendly website.

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Any student looking for a placement will tell you how hard it is. It’s difficult finding time to fill out application forms around assignments, deadlines, and most importantly round your social life – a definite challenge even for the most organised person. You have to be fully committed to the search and really invest time into researching each role and company before you can answer questions, ultimately you have to prove you can jump through hoops in just a couple of pages of A4. (My favourite application question “If you were a biscuit, what biscuit would you be?”.

Selling yourself in.

If you are lucky enough it’s onto the next stage of the process- interviews! Interviews are equally as hard, especially when you are up against other students who study similar degrees. I learnt quickly that you had to really make yourself stand out from other candidates in order to get the job. I did this by highlighting my extensive work experience and extracurricular activities and relating these back to the role. I feel that these areas really helped me in being successful with my application at Red C. An interview is your only opportunity to sell yourself, make a good impression, and persuade why the company to invest in you.

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It’s arrival was hailed as an opportunity to generate tourism and increase economic activity across the UK, so there was no doubt that London 2012 was a once in a lifetime opportunity for businesses to rake in the benefits, so why did it end up causing no end of grief for businesses across the UK?

With the likes of Adidas and Coca-Cola paying copious amounts of money for the privilege of becoming London 2012 official partners, the IOC (International Olympics Committee) created branding laws in order to preserve the exclusivity of these world renowned sponsors. The sole aim of this committee was to ensure no one was using the Olympics brand unless they had paid huge amounts of money for the privilege. Not only had the IOC created a protective layer around the word Olympics, the Olympic symbols and the Games’ mottoes, they also created a legislation against unauthorised association, banning non-sponsors from using images or wording that may suggest a close link to the Games, preventing the unauthorised use of words such as ‘London’, ‘London Twenty Twelve’, ‘Gold’, ‘Silver’, ‘Bronze’ and, most ludicrously, ‘Summer.’ Dubbed by critics as the ‘Brand Police’, the IOC then had the authority to impose whopping great fines of up to £20,000 on anyone that engaged in such activities.

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