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…

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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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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Advertising agency self-promotion is a wily old beast. Being given carte blanche for a piece of new business dm may seem like a creatives’ dream, but anyone who’s ever had a crack at the perennial Christmas card brief knows that in order to give your agency standout, whatever you come up, no matter how pretty, needs to have some really solid thinking behind it.

And in our case, an injection of something a little bit weirder.

Of course, when I said ‘carte blanche’ I actually was referring to the new double-dip recession version which can be defined roughly as thus: ‘Do what you like, but don’t take the mick’. Fair enough. Blowing the cash for our Christmas party six months before the event wasn’t going to make us popular anyway, so the wooing of potential clients with a personalised Tom-Jones-a-gram was (sadly) out of the question.

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When luxury range cooker brand AGA came to Red C to develop their new flagship website, we knew that eye tracking was key to creating an effective website. In our latest revealing case study we lift the lid on how we used eye tracking to assess usability and navigation and how it helped us understand the different customer journeys that prospects took throughout the website.

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It’s less than a week to go until our new TV advert campaign for cottages4you and VisitEngland is launched, so we thought it would be a good opportunity to look back on everything we’ve achieved – boy has it been a whirlwind few months!

This project started over 6 months ago, when we were asked to pitch for a joint campaign with cottages4you and VisitEngland. That in itself presented quite a challenge: 2 separate clients each with a different objective. It meant we really had to put our heads to together to come up with a cracking ad that essentially met 2 briefs! We knew it would be tricky but we couldn’t wait to start.

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It’s easy to get a bit disillusioned with award ceremonies. You head there with a nomination, hoping that this might be your year. Sometimes it is and you come back not just with the gong, but the respect of your peers too. But sometimes it’s not to be. And while it’s tempting to shrug your shoulders, pretend you’re not really bothered or that some terrible injustice has befallen you, actually it’s always better just to hold your hands up and say well done.

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Clients to keep happy, prospects to pitch to, ideas to generate. It’s pretty much work, work, work all day, every day here at Red C.

We work round the clock, against the clock…and quite often in fear of the clock. With another deadline always looming it sometimes seems like we never stop!

Which of course we don’t. Ours is a fast-paced industry that throws us a new challenge almost every day – and that’s why we love it.

When the going gets tough we work twice as hard, sustaining ourselves with strong coffee, short lunches and plenty of biscuits. We wouldn’t have it any other way.

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When I was a kid growing up in Bradford I had one very memorable trip home from school that involved walking right through the middle of a riot. You see, some dude called Salman Rushdie had put pen to paper and written something called the Satanic Verses… and quite a few people were very unhappy that it was being sold in our city (which has a high Muslim population), so unhappy in fact that they decided to smash up the centre of Bradford.

History is littered with groups of people turning to violence, or drastic action, to both highlight their anger at something or demand change within society. From the Suffragettes burning their bras to the student protests in the US against the Vietnam War to more recent G20 protests around the world.

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Picking up from where Julian left off on Day 1, I started my day at Earls Court by throwing myself into a seminar on “stories of multichannel email marketing success” and started to quickly understand why Julian had been so impressed the day before!

“Consumers now have a megaphone”

Grabbed my attention straight away.  The marketing landscape has changed dramatically. If we only look back to the year 2000 – it is enough to make me feel like I have been part of a pretty impressive revolution! Previously as marketers we all focused on a “push” strategy, we planted ideas in consumers heads, told them what to believe, and what to buy. The interaction was all one way and we just kept on banging our big marketing drums!

Times have changed…

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