Mercedes allocates half of its UK marketing budget to digital

Mercedes-Benz has announced that it will allocate 50% of its marketing budget to digital media.

Mercedes VP for brand communications, Anders Sundt Jensen, said the dynamics of the UK market and the advanced consumer behaviour in the UK meant the automotive brand was already allocating half of its budget to digital, way ahead of other European countries where the company was far from allocating anywhere near even 40%.

He said the key to success is due to online specialists already based within the company.

“We don’t have normal marketers just doing online ads, or just putting our TV ads online,” Jensen said. “For example, we have a whole department at our headquarters in Germany just doing digital marketing.”

This is certainly a major step forward for digital media as a preferred medium as it currently take only a small piece of the budgeting pie considered to traditional media within most businesses today. Having said that its (digital media) influence is increasing steadily due to the rise of social media and consumers online presence.

It will certainly be exciting to see what sort of ideas and campaigns Mercedes digital department comes up in the next few months whilst having this large budget to work with.

Reformed Burberry to explore social media

Burberry, the famous British luxury fashion brand has announced their plans for a social network website to be available next month. The reason behind the website named artofthetrench.com, is to offer consumers a stronger brand experience. Artofthetrench.com will feature users sending in pictures of themselves wearing the famous Burberry trenchcoats. Burberry currently has over 660,000 fans on Facebook, more than any other luxury brand, and this is seen as an encouraging sign for CEO, Angela Ahrendts.

"These might not even be customers yet. Or they may be a customer for a bottle of fragrance or for eyewear," she said.

"But these are the customers who need the brand experience, who need to feel the brand. That word-of-mouth spreads through their social networks and continues to be a positive conversation [about Burberry] . . . that is so powerful."

Burberry has been working to overcome an image problem in recent years and have made significant steps to do so. The brand has in the past been associated with football hooliganism and 'chavs'. It was forced to dump Kate Moss in 2005 after after the supermodel was pictured allegedly snorting cocaine. However, now Burberry has generated a buzz of real excitement around it leading up to London Fashion Week.

I believe that the social network will have some fairly minimal levels of success. I think that simply asking people to send in pictures of themselves in Burberry clothing is not a strong enough incentive to become actively involved with the website for a meaningful length of time. Also because Burberry has a large number of fans does not necessarily mean that they all own Burberry products. They could just admire their work.

If Burberry can come up with a stronger mixture of content and added incentives then I'm sure they will have greater success with this approach.

iPhone Spotify and now Flickr!

Flickr has officially come to iPhone.

iPhone is the most popular camera on Flickr and now Flickr have now returned the favor with the new iPhone Flickr app.
The app enables you to easily share the photos you’ve captured with iPhone’s camera, geo-tag them, and add them to sets.

This has come after Spotify's iPhone app coming under mixed reviews. The hype surrounding the release of the Spotify app for Premium users was big to say the least. However with some usability problems arising it has come under some criticism.

Joe Heath's feedback on my time at BBH

"Tom @ BBH

Efficient, bright and ready to work…

Tom very quickly got stuck in to a number of projects at BBH, delivering at every turn across a number key brands. He showed an ability to quickly understand the problem at hand, the tools to get the job done and came through when it was most needed.

A pleasure to work with"

Joe Heath - Engagement Planner

Thanks Joe

Day 9: Internship at BBH

Today was my last day at BBH.
I had my presentation on Parents communities and social networks ready for Joe. Half way going through my findings I received an important phone call from Martin at Apple, I had been for an interview a few days before and they wanted me back for a 2nd interview on Monday!
After the 5 minute phone call I went back and finished going through my work with Joe. Afterwards he explained to me how they were going to use my research within their strategy for the Fruit Shoot website. It was really interesting to see and I think they have a great campaign. Check out the Fruit Shoot website to see the kinds of useful activities there are for kids to learn and enjoy at http://www.fruitshoot.com/

I spent the rest of the day doing the work for Daniele looking at community centres and youth clubs within the selected cities.
I have really enjoyed working at BBH and their young but experienced staff were very welcoming and a pleasure to work with.

Day 8: Internship at BBH

I was asked today to look for social network and online community websites for Parents and Mothers. I already had some knowledge of these websites from an interview I had with i-Level for my dissertation. Using Google Ad Planner I was able to find a large number of websites and narrowed them down to list of 10 for Fruit Shoot.

Daniele had an extra task for me, which was to look at the main targeted cities for Fruit Shoot and research specific areas within theses locations that may take on Fruit Shoot for kids activity projects currently running there.

Day 7: Internship at BBH

So today I went through my list of appropriate websites to Joe and Daniele. They seemed to find the websites themselves really interesting and wanted to know what sort of content and features were displayed on the pages. Following this I went away and was given a new brief that might add a few extra websites to the list, so I did. Moshi Monsters was a good example of one of the interesting social networks out there used by young children.

Daniele later on in the day took me through Google Analytics and showed me how it works and the information BBH has currently on the site. From here I was asked to pick out certain cities that were the most engaging with the Fruit Shoot website, based on Average time on the site and the number of unique visitors.

Day 6: Internship at BBH

Yesterday was a bank holiday so it was a nice long weekend. I was in beginning my 2nd week at BBH after being invited back to work on their Fruit Shoot project.

Today I was asked to do research on Kids Social Networks, ages between 8-12. I looked at how popular they were in the UK, whether they accepted advertising and whether they were suitable for the Fruit Shoot brand.
I managed to find about 12 really good examples, but it took a whole day of research.