No matter how hard you may have tried, not many people managed to escape the ‘Big Freeze’ that hit Britain a couple of weeks ago. The whole country pretty much came to a standstill when snow and ice covered the UK, in what was some of the worst weather we’ve seen in thirty years.

Businesses and schools across the country were forced to close when roads became impassable and public transport ground to a halt. Even us hardy folk at Red C struggled to get into the office, with only those that come on foot making it here. With so many people off work, you’d have thought the high street would be bustling, but figures from Footfall indicate that shopper numbers on 5th January were down 13.5% on last year. 53 of the 285 stores in Meadowhall shopping centre, Sheffield were closed on this day, and The Trafford Centre in Manchester only managed to open half of its stores and restaurants - before closing the entire complex at 4pm. Read more…

Marketing is not a nostalgic business. With the constant emergence of new technologies, advertisers need to keep bang up to date to avoid being left behind. Just think back a year. At the beginning of 2009, Twitter was still a relatively niche social network, Spotify wasn’t yet available to the general public and search engine Bing didn’t even exist. One year on and all these technologies may be fundamental to creating a successful advertising campaign.

So what’s next? What will the ‘big thing’ of 2010 be? Well, I’m not going to try and predict that, but I will tell you what will make the next ‘big thing’ happen – and that’s the Ubiquitous Network. In fact, I’m confident it’ll change the future of advertising and marketing forever…

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Loadsa Money!!!

I have some good news and some bad news.  The good news is you are only a few short words from success in your next email campaign.  The bad news is that establishing what those “few short words” should be is a task that takes a great deal of deliberation and consideration.  Well, it certainly should be. Subject lines can literally make or break an email’s performance – influencing everything from the opening rate to the click through rate. Obviously there are other contributing factors – the day and time of send to name but two – but without a doubt the key influencer has to be those “few short words”.

Now, I’ll be up front with you.  I’m not going to give you a magic formula for “can’t fail subject lines.” For one thing I don’t believe such a one-size-fits-all solution actually exists.  However, what I am going to give you is a series of tips and factors that you should always consider, when trying to establish what works for your audience.  Bear in mind this is not a something you will complete in an afternoon.  It will take a great deal of time and patience, but the rewards can be substantial.

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Ever had a cheese, jam and Nice ‘n’ Spicy Nik Naks sandwich? Sounds disgusting? How do you know if you’ve not tasted it? I mean you like cheese don’t you? You like jam don’t you? And everyone loves Nice ‘n’ Spicy Nik Naks… so what’s the problem! Are you not curious as to what it might taste like?

Being curious about everything is essential if you want to be anything better than just a good Creative. Back when I was 17 I loved cheese, jam and Nice ‘n’ Spicy Nik Naks sandwiches… I also read an Encyclopedia from cover to cover and in my early twenties I happily listened as my best friend (who’s an incredibly bright bloke) explained Cosmology to me… all because one day I knew this stuff would be useful.

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Imagine walking down any street and holding up your iPhone… what you see on the screen is a view of the street yet there are lots of Zombies running towards you that you then have to shoot. Or imagine walking up to a wall and touching it… just for the wall to then display the view that is on the other side of it…. This is the world of Augmented Reality and it’s a world that looks like it’s going to be very big indeed.

Put simply, Augmented Reality blurs the line between what’s real and what’s computer-generated by enhancing what we see, hear, feel and smell. It adds graphics, sounds, and smell to our world… and through a normal pair of glasses or display screen, informative graphics appear in your field of view, and audio coincides with whatever you see. These enhancements are then refreshed continually to reflect the movements of your head and the world around you.

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I love shopping online. I can do it from the comfort of my home, not having to rush from shop to shop and then back to the first shop again, deal with fitting room queues or worry about buying something before closing time. If I have something in particular in mind then it’s also great being able to search for it with the whole internet at my fingertips and specify what price, colour or brand I want. And I’m not the only one! According to Nielsen over 875 million of us have shopped online, with that number increasing 40% from two years ago. And despite falls in sales on the high-street, online shopping has seen a 13% rise on 2008 with the most popular purchases being Books, Clothing & Accessories, DVDs & Games, Tickets and Electronic Equipment.

But shopping online can sometimes be a bit solitary. It doesn’t replace going shopping on the high street with your friends and picking out clothes together and it doesn’t replace the buzz you get from having loads of shopping bags full of new things that you can’t wait to try on again at home. So that’s why online shopping had to evolve into something more visually and socially appealing. And with the boom in social networking sites and niche communities social shopping was born.  OSOYOU was one of the first online shopping communities and was launched in 2007. It acts as an aggregator of fashion and beauty products with 49 of the top retailers on there. But shoppers can also create their own profile, chat with each other in forums and drag products into their own “style file” to show off their most wanted items.

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According to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), illegal downloading of music is solely responsible for a 23% decrease in worldwide sales of music CDs between 2000 and 2006. And in 2008, music sales fell from 449.2 million in 2007 to 360.6 million in 2008, according to Nielsen Co.’s SoundScan service.

It will come as no surprise then that people’s attitudes towards illegally downloading music have changed dramatically in the last few years. Researchers in the UK from the Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property (SABIP) found that 1.3m people used one file-sharing network on one weekday, from that they estimated that over one year these downloaders would have free access to material worth £12bn. And there is no sign of attitudes changing towards illegally downloading music.

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Do you like music? Okay, stupid question: I might as well ask if you like converting oxygen into carbon dioxide, or Christmas Dinner. Everyone loves a good tune – with the possible exception of Andrew Lloyd Webber – and there’s nothing better than getting it for nothing. Remember how the holy grail of free music lured an entire generation into the open paws of that creepy Napster cat? Until the Recording Industry Association tied the bugger up in a burlap sack and chucked it in the Mississippi, of course.

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Believe it or not, Mahatma Gandhi is a bit of a hero of mine. I forget how many times I’ve said to people “Be the change you want to see in the world”… which I always confess is stolen from the great man himself.

One of the lovely things about Social Networking is how it has galvanised people into creating interest groups with the aim of creating change in the world. A quick search on Facebook under Darfur reveals one kind fellow promising to give $1 to every 1,0000 people who join his Facebook group.

Although such campaigns have the best intentions, you never really get to see whether they have worked or not, mainly because these groups have such lofty ambitions. There are, however, Social Networking sites out there that have a better plan… a plan that involves changing the world one small piece at a time.

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During the 1980s and 1990s, two giants of the soft drinks world went to war. In the red corner we had the Coca-Cola Company. In the blue corner was PepsiCo. While Coca-Cola would entice us with the ‘New Coke’ before seducing us back again with ‘Classic Coke’; Pepsi used a whole host of pop and movie stars to show us they were the ‘Taste for a New Generation’ and even went as far as demonstrating to us that the average person on the street preferred Pepsi thanks to their ‘Pepsi Challenge’.

Just when we thought the marketing landscape was getting a little dull, we now have a new battle on the horizon. Instead of battling to quench your thirst… this time we have a battle to satisfy your online search needs. Ladies and Gentlemen, boys and girls… let’s get ready to rumble as Facebook, Google and Microsoft go to war in the battle to become the undisputed heavyweight champion of the search engines.

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