Red Bull tagged posts

Ambush marketing threat to global sponsors!

Pepsi unofficialDuring major sports events, non-official sponsor brand owners will start to consider actively pursuing ‘guerrilla or ‘ambush marketing’ tactics as they seek a free ride on the back of major events such as the Commonwealth Games in GlasgowFIFA World Cup in Brazil, the Tour de France or the Wimbledon Tennis Championships.

But like so much in marketing, they’re two schools of thought on the subject of ‘ambush marketing’.

Pro-ambush

Those who are in favour of ‘ambush marketing’ including the European Sponsorship Association (ESA) argue it’s a perfectly acceptable form of marketing activity for a non-sponsor to be engaged with provided it doesn’t brea...

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Are you content with marketing or like your marketing with content?

Content Marketing imageNo, this isn’t a crossword conundrum or trick question but in fact the essence of the debate I chaired on Thursday 1 May at the offices of BNY Mellon ahead of the PRCA’s PR Council Meeting.

Like most things in life, there are at least two sides to every story – whether it’s the forthcoming EU General Data Protection Regulation that threatens to obliterate the freedom of marketers to track behaviour of consumers or the ethics of sponsoring education content in the classroom.

You can be sure that whenever you get two marketers in the room, you’ll have at least three points of view.

So when it comes to ‘content marketing’… well, you can bet there’s as many views on the ...

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Does “Content Marketing” matter?

The Big PR issueLast week I sat in a meeting with colleagues from across the PR industry that was discussing precisely this question as part of the “Content Marketing” work stream set up by the PRCA, the largest body representing PR professionals in the UK and the largest body of its kind in Europe.

By the middle of 2014, the PRCA hope to have moved our thinking forward on the subject and attempted to clarify what is – and what is not – “Content Marketing”. For the moment, the field is wide open for interpretation and potential confusion. So why does “Content Marketing” matter and is there any merit searching for some form of clarification that will enable our thinking to be bi...

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‘Brand Wars’ at Sochi Olympic Games 2014

Tapping over Apple logo at Sochi 2014So the question on most marketers’ lips at the half-way stage of the Sochi Winter Olympic Games 2014 is who’s winning brand gold and who’s coming last in the multi-million dollar sponsorship stakes?

Well, this picture sums up the problem, doesn’t it?

An Olympic Official at Sochi with duct tape sticking it over the Apple logo of the laptop belonging to Associated Press director of international video Mark Davies. As if this pretty innocuous indirect view of an Apple logo on this laptop justifies this type of treatment?

Well, it’s bonkers really but then you need to understand the reasoning behind this extreme form Olympic brand protection.

Non-Olympic partners such as ...

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“You have part of my attention. You have the minimum amount.”

the-social-networkThat line came from the Hollywood movie The Social Network and gave credence to the view that the old interruption model of brand communication doesn’t work anymore.

And by that I mean advertising.

Check the stats. The average consumer is exposed to a minimum of 3,500 marketing messages in a day and 99% of these ads fail to have any impact.

It’s marketing overload and marketing clutter. Consumers’ brains are now programmed to screen out – not screen in – messages. It’s a nightmare if you still continue to cling to ‘high decibel’ marketing techniques.

Old style media owners got fat by selling mass audiences to advertisers...

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