The most common form of marketing innovation carried out by enterprises according to a recently published Central Statistics Office survey was new media.
The Community Innovation Survey 2006-2008 is a survey of innovation activities of enterprises in Ireland and other EU Member States, jointly conducted by the Central Statistics Office (CSO) and Forfás in Ireland.
According to the survey, just one in four of all enterprises (27%) carried out a marketing innovation between 2006 and 2008. The larger the company, the more likely this was: marketing innovation was introduced by over one in three medium and large enterprises in the same time frame. Also, foreign-owned companies in Ireland were more likely than Irish companies to be more innovative on the marketing front, the survey found. Almost one in three foreign owned enterprises introduced a marketing innovation in the period 2006-2008 compared to over one in four Irish-owned enterprises.

On the new media front 16% of all enterprises indicated that they engaged in the introduction of new media or techniques for product promotion; nearly 19% of foreign owned enterprises introduced these compared to over 15% of Irish owned enterprises. 15% of businesses with 10-49 employees introduced innovation in this area compared to 21% of companies with 50-249 staff members and 24% of organisations with more than 250 employees.
According to the survey findings the reasons for innovation in marketing varied from increasing or maintaining market share (three quarters of respondents) and to introduce products to new customer groups (three in five enterprises).
Increased or maintaining market share was an important reason for nearly nine in ten large enterprises compared to just seven in ten small enterprises. Again it was more important for foreign owned enterprises than Irish enterprises (eight in ten compared to seven in ten, respectively).
The survey can be found in full here: http://www.cso.ie/releasespublications/documents/information_tech/2008/comminn0608.pdf

Leo Burnett’s futures editor has predicted the rise of the masses this year, as popular culture grabs control of the internet. Read the seven big predictions for 2008 here.

The power of mass culture will be back. At the end of last year, online downloads were included as part of the U.K. Christmas pop chart for the first time ever. This trend of online popularity being institutionalised shows that mass appeal will once again define marketing attitudes. Where once the watchwords were fragmentation and micro-targeting, Google, YouTube and Del.ici.ous are new gauges of mass appeal, a fact marketing will wake up to. The goal is the same — reach a mass audience. The difference is how to achieve it. Say hello to the swell society. How do you create ’swells’ in pop culture when the audience is not necessarily captive and waiting in the first instance? How do you make sure that your film or viral grabs a spot in YouTube’s top ten, guaranteeing the attention of millions? The marketing means may be changing, but the objective is the same.

Community commerce
Community connections will become more central to business practice. Retailers will seek to bring the community further inside the store, with more coffee shops, banking services and pharmacies within supermarkets. On top of this, a revolutionary development in the relationship between commerce and society will take place, when Sainsbury’s opens a police station inside its Fallowfield store in Manchester. On the other side community connections are being used to create new businesses for established brands. The Sun newspaper online bingo community was set up in 2005 and is now the biggest Internet game in the world. From an experimental brand-stretch three years ago, the community is now News Corp’s biggest digital cash cow. Expect to see more established brands following suit this year. You never know, we may see Bisto using its family connections to become the new Butlins!

Screen saturation
Moving forward we will see the explosion of screen-based media, with screens on the side of buses, in petrol stations, supermarkets, the home and the pocket. While the medium may remain the same, the reach, context, audience and role of the media will be tweaked. There will be more broadcast screens than ever in 2010 and things are only going to get bigger. According to Sharp — the electronics manufacturer — the average television screen size will be 60 inches by 2015. A ‘big bang’ of screen based media means we’ll have to be both more broadminded and sharper when we define what we mean by ‘outdoor’, and smarter when we develop creative for it.

Gender reversal
More women in work and the increasing role played by men within the family will see marketers change their focus. Three years ago the Office for National Statistics discovered that women outstripped men in U.K. further education enrolment, which means most will be graduating this year and looking to enter the work force. Men’s interest and investment in the family will continue to rise as well, morphing the gender balance and changing the advertising context. Expect to see more and more campaigns aimed at women at work and men in the home. With gender differences diminishing, new forms of identity will be emerging in 2008.

Brand guardians
The role of brands is evolving and will enter a new phase. With growing concerns over how to be healthy, safe and environmentally friendly, mixed with a real confusion about how to achieve this, we will see brands increasingly attempting to take on a guardian role. Forward-thinking policies, honest brand ethics and a general ethos of wellbeing and comfort in one’s choices will be promoted by the most leading-edge amongst them. We have already seen the beginning of this trend with a campaign like Kellogg’s Bran Flakes’ ‘Three Step Program’, but as public confidence and trust levels continue to waver we will see many more brands striving for guardianship status, making this a significant trend in years to come. The brands of the future will live out the interests of their consumers. Consumers will help brands make their own lives better. We will then know our customers better than ever and, in turn, they will trust us to use their information to create a better future for both.

IP idols
Artists are grabbing control of their creative product. Intellectual Property (creative works — ideas, songs, movies, TV shows) used to be owned and licensed by studios, record labels and other commercial institutions, but we will see artists back in the driving seat. At the end of 2007, Madonna signed to the Live Nation label, giving her unprecedented control over her albums, concerts, tours, merchandise, websites, DVDs, sponsorship, TV shows and films. Other IP idols will grow in power and commercial clout this year. Simon Cowell has shown himself to be bigger than the pop charts by taking over the Christmas number one spot via a TV show. You may not like him, but you wish you’d thought of it. The man has taken over an entire industry through success in another sector, proof of the power of IP idols, even over entire media channels.

The data awareness era
The public will be more aware of their data exposure than ever before and privacy concerns will be a defining issue in the future. Until now the disarming novelty on social networks, like MySpace and Facebook, has generally overridden concerns about the potential hazards of full disclosure but this is all set to change this year. High profile data leaks like the British Government’s recent loss of computer disks containing child benefit records have raised awareness of privacy issues. As more employers and university admissions officers troll social networks for potentially embarrassing revelations on candidates, users may decide that it is better to leave the Saturday night snapshots in their mobile phones. Expect this trend to accelerate with the introduction of GPS location based information, the explosion in online information storage and social networking increasingly reflecting real life.

Social networks get real
Social networks like Facebook, Bebo and MySpace have been virtual playgrounds for some time, but they will now start to plug directly back into the real world. Increasingly we will see social networks beginning to dictate everyday life, influencing who people do business with, which parties, movies and gigs they go to, where they meet and with whom. Accelerating the shift to life itself being organised through Facebook or MySpace, is the advent and take up of mobile social networking: 14m people did it in 2007, and forecasts suggest it could hit 600m by 2012. Allowing people to participate on the move, mobile applications will turn Facebook and the like from a method of meeting old school friends to a real time diary of their very real lives. Never far off the pace, Google is rumoured to be launching ‘Google World’ this year, using Google Earth as the framework. This is the Internet giant’s answer to Facebook and Second Life. As the Ars Technica blog reports: ‘Google CTO Michael Jones insisted … Google Earth would always remain true to the real world and not dive into the type of fantasy world that Second Life has become. Therefore, Google’s implementation would be more like ‘First Life’, but in virtual form.’Social networks will no longer be simply voyeuristic frivolities, they will help us participate in actual activities with our existing friends and acquaintances, in real life, with sunshine, colour, oxygen and everything.

Ellie Doyle - Prosperity Digital. Information provided by Leo Burnetts.

They have got oodles of cash as we all know. Banks seem to the forefront when it comes to tapping into any Sponsorship deals on offer; Halifax, previously known as The Bank of Scotland, have sponsored the 2fm Breakfast featuring Jim Nugent and Colm Hayes to the tune of €350,000.

Expensive business some may say but sponsorship has worked for them in the past:  Bank of Scotland’s clever campaigns around the Leinster Rugby plus the winning form of the side itself has fuelled a high profile and successful relationship between both parties.

The Bank of Scotland / Halifax  has also become involved in competitions on the Late Late with a prize of up to €30k. With new branding in and ambitious marketing plans to grow their share in Ireland, Halifax have got their fingers in the right pies so far.  Will the new 2fm show hit the right heights for them? We will wait and see . . .

Marketers take note: whether you agree or disagree with the producer’s decision not to pull the show, word of mouth marketing is the most powerful form of media communications.

Forget Rocky Balboa, this is the only boxing ring that matters right now - on one side you have a glamorous and beautiful actress from India, stylish, sophisticated and a genuinely nice person, and on the other side you have Jade, a total bully and her side kicks Jo and Danielle, who between them look like they have obviously been in one too many rounds in the past. Their coach Jackie has been banned from ringside, (thanks be to god),  but Shilpa has taken a few serious knocks from Jade, emotionally and mentally, and the public are cheering for Shilpa like they once cheered for Rocky.

It seems to me that this evil triumvirate feel very threatened by Shilpa Shetty – even these “never been / has beens” must at some sub-intelligent level be aware of what their celebrity is built on: nothing. Then they encounter a truly beautiful, talented and accomplished person in the form of Shilpa Shetty, and the illusion of their celebrity is threatened, so what can their vulnerable egos do but compel them to attack. This paragraph calls for historical references to lumpen barbarians pulling down that which is finely crafted and beautiful, but then I might just be labouring the point.

Well the media are of  course in a frenzy about it all and the producers are more than likely doing cartwheels around the office to the fact their show achieves such postmodern accolades as the most complained about show in history . . .  and of course the most talked about, even PM Tony Blair and Gordon Brown are taking note of it.

I think Shilpa summed it up when she said:  I am here representing India, are these girls representing the UK? It’s very scary. And Channel 4 is ever the impresario to this British culture of worshipping no-talents – it is a cruel trick to build them up and then drop a bunker buster like Shilpa Shetty into the middle of them . . . cruel, but it gets the country talking about it, and that’s good marketing!

MM

After a 3 year soccer low at Real Madrid, was it the end of Becks?
No, it was only the end of the illusion that David Beckham is still admired for his soccer skills. Beckham has decided to rid himself of the inconvenience of being a top level soccer player, and bring his brand - the idea, the image of Becks - to the  place where they will evangelically sell it.

It make perfect sense, Becks and Posh are style  icons, and Becks is just lending his name to one more brand, that being LA Galaxy, and receiving $265 million for his endorsement.. Who needs the hard cold bench of Real Madrid? Who needs the hassle of being involved in an underperforming Spanish football club? Learning Spanish when you have barely mastered English?  Showing up for training every day, yet sitting out the majority of games?

Becks and Posh will be truly home at last, where they belong - it is as if Posh clicked her Jimmy Choos together and made a wish.

Odds on the Beckham brand will now go truly  stellar, and I mean bigger than big - US company giants like General Motors, Anheuser-Busch and Coca-Cola will be after a piece of Becks faster than you can order a Skinny Caffe Latte. Beckham already earns in excess of $32 million a year and earns more in endorsements than any other football player in the game.
The fact he looks like a male model helped secure his most lucrative endorsement to date - $9 million over three years with Gillette. So now that the legs are getting tired, it’s time to move off the pitch and fully in to brands, even though he will of course be playing for LA Galaxy, who??

MM