Archive for the ‘UK’ Category

Senior account manager/ Account director – Corporate & Technology
Fantastic opportunity for an ambitious, tech savvy SAM/AD who wants to make their mark and take a leadership role in a rapidly growing Corporate & Technology practice. The last six months has seen huge growth with four new clients coming on board and more expected to kick off in the New Year. Great balance between big global campaigns (working with our offices in the US and Asia-Pacific) and UK/European clients.

We are looking for someone who is both strategic and hands on. Who understands that clients are at the heart of our business and prides themselves on the fact their clients love them. Someone who isn’t scared to get out there and shout about the great work they do, but can be a strong team leader and an inspiration for junior team members.

Think you have all that? Get in touch.

Account executive/ Senior account executive
Fancy something a bit more challenging? Interested in an opportunity to play a key role in a rapidly growing practice? We are looking for a tech savvy account executive to join our Corporate & Technology practice. We are looking for someone who understands that media is at the heart of PR and wields their journalist contacts book with pride. Self-starting, ambitious, fun loving and organised – we want the lot. The team here at Ruder Finn is one of the best and we are happy to admit we are looking for more of the same!

Does that sound like you? If so, get in touch.

About Ruder Finn Corporate & Technology
The Corporate & Technology division has a broad range of clients from major blue chip enterprise technology providers through to science and engineering, digital and entertainment and professional services. The team works closely with our Digital division on a number of campaigns and both divisions have seen huge growth over the last year.

Ruder Finn in one of the world’s biggest independent agencies and you will have the opportunity to work on some fantastic brands on big, global campaigns. You would be joining at an exciting time – we move into some fantastic new offices in the New Year, have a new website soon to be launched and have great momentum going into 2012.

Competitive salary, great benefits, fabulous team…

London’s public transport system is again crippled due to strike action. The strike started at 7pm last night and by 11pm many of the lines were starting to be affected:


Move forward to this morning and it was a similar picture:


Things should be back to normal on Thursday morning, but a strike is again expected at the end of the month. This is cross-posted from my personal blog.

In the UK, the internet industry has become a media sector lobbyists football. From the Digital Economy Bill and the music-mogul entertained holiday in Corfu that Lord Mandelson denied to Labour prospective parliamentary candidate Richard Mollet’s leaked memo it is obvious that there is a political and commercial will to cripple the internet and turn Digital Britain into an analogue third-world country.

Where this likely to focus next is on social media and the uses of social media in marketing. A key problem with social media compared to other marketing platforms such as cinema and television advertising is the lack of effective, respected age barriers. With television advertising you have the 9pm watershed, adverts on rental films can rely on the age classification, as can cinema advertisers and even print adverts can rely on TGI data to demonstrate sufficient care that they weren’t targeting minors.

Contrast this with many social media platforms, notably Facebook, which has a 13 year-old age limit for participation, yet 37 per cent of 5-to-7 year-olds had visited Facebook and 25 per cent of children surveyed had some sort of social network profile according to an Ofcom survey referenced by Fast Company. If you look at applications in Facebook, their purile content could be considered to be aimed at the under-13s.

Ok, but why is this an issue?

OPPORTUNITY COST.

Societies have generally had negative impressions of the latest forms of media and their effect on young people: rock n’ roll and rave music, video games, films, television and the internet have all had this in common. There is no better example of this fear than the Daily Mail’s recent scare story about sexual predators on Facebook.

Conversely, the heat is also going out of other businesses as the time, attention and money moves to social networks:

• Televsion: ITV has seen a progressive decline in advertising revenues and audience figures for a number of years to online properties
• Cinemas can be argued to have had a similar problem stemming back to the 1980s when excessive advertising inventory was considered to impact the cinema-going experience
• Radio stations have seen a reduction in investment and retrenchment from stations due to a lack of revenue
• Newspapers failure to deal with the digital world is legendary

All of these businesses can see revenue going elsewhere that they could consider to be legitimately theirs. The recent BBC retrenchment in online is partly due to the corporate revisiting non-core online franchises and as a way of heading off lobbying by media companies. This has also has to be seen in the catastrophic records that media companies have had on their disastrous online ventures notably Friends Reunited, Bebo and MySpace.

I believe that social networking and social media is especially vulnerable to over-regulation in the UK. There is ample ammunition in the Ofcom report to encourage regulation and the forthcoming governing of social media by the ASA doesn’t fill me with confidence that the regulators understand the very real differences between social media and advertising content.

So what is it likely to mean?

• The biggest impact is probably going to be on application developers who are likely to be further challenged on building viral applications whilst not overtly marketing to children. An application installation may require a ‘date of birth’ registration screen to demonstrate that due care and attention has been paid to reach over 13s
• Facebook advertisers are much more at the mercy of Facebook in terms of the accuracy of age groups, but may have to introduce an age request page as an interstitial after clickthrough
• Moderation on Facebook on groups and comments on fan pages is likely to require heavier intervention to ensure that claims by commenters do not breach ASA guidelines, which is likely to be a buzzkill on community building as consumers will feel excessive constrained and ‘messaged’

But real question will this legislative kraken drive eyeballs and revenues back to the analogue media titans? I don’t think so, there are very few media vehicles that have staged as dramatic a media turnaround, even with a favourable regulatory environment.

For many international brands it maybe looking at pumping more into campaigns driven out of the US at US consumers and hoping for a positive audience bleed from the UK. This has an additional advantage that ASA regulations on competitive adverts can be flouted and campaigns can go negative. This would be a good bet for them. When I was at Yahoo! about half the UK users went to the US site and I would estimate that this was similar with other US online properties. Short of going to a North Korean-style web experience there isn’t much that could be done about this.

A secondary impact of this would be a reduced demand for UK-based agencies and practitioners as technically these campaigns would be US work. Many US-based international corporations would be more than happy to retrench more marketing spend in their own country where their head office managers have more control over the projects to ensure consistency.

Given that, an estimated 48,000 people employed in PR at the moment and social media is the future you are talking about regulation would actively encourage the off-shoring thousands of well-paid white collar jobs, as well as a further dent in the UK as a creative hub for the marketing services sector. This doesn’t include the countless digital creatives in Soho and beyond or the advertising groups like WPP who have decided that the future is digital. Once this talent is gone, there will be no turning back. This was first published at my personal blog.

When the Sex Pistols played their last concert at the famous Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco John Lydon’s final remark to the audience was “Ah-ha-ha. Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated? Good night“.

I was reminded of that phrase when I looked at data by the SASI Research Group (University of Sheffield) which shows how much debt western Europe actually has in comparison to the rest of the world. It is one of the most frightening images I have ever seen.  This was originally published on my personal blog.

Labour, the Lib-Dems and now the SNP all have at least one thing in common, they all seem to have the Tories directly in their crosshairs as the Tories seem to be under the most scrutiny and attack so far in the election campaign.

Of course none of this is a shock, it is only natural for the parties to have a go at each other, but what is striking about the attacks on the Tories is that it would normally be reserved for an incumbent Government, rather than the Opposition. The Tories are obviously the bookies favourite to win the most seats, at the very least the largest number in a Hung Parliament, so they are seen as the biggest threat by all of the parties.

Labour is obviously going after the Tories on everything as their prime competition. The Lib-Dems are trying to impress themselves onto voters as the eligible kingmakers whilst protecting their own seats which is evidenced most recently by Nick Clegg launching a “VAT Bombshell” poster campaign focusing on the Tory tax scheme. Alex Salmond is also trying to scare voters away from voting Tory in Scotland by running with a line that the Tories will go on a “smash-and-grab” spree by reviewing £1billion worth of funding to Scotland.

The latest Lib-Dem attack on the Conservative tax strategy

Of all of the parties, this probably benefits Labour the most as a lot of the “attack-dog” work they would normally have to do is being done by the smaller parties on a far more targeted level than the Labour election war chest would normally allow. The Tories therefore have to spend more time defending their policies and ideas on a national scale as well as batting away attacks on a more geographically targeted scale. Labour, while still needing to point out their perceived flaws in Conservative policy has more of an opportunity to sell in their policies.

Whether this will make a huge difference on Election Day, we will only know on May 7 but what is sure is the Tories would like more scrutiny on Labour, rather than being almost constantly defending their own policies and agenda. Labour would therefore be enjoying the underdog status and it is well known this is a position where Brown feels very comfortable.

Cross posted with my personal blog.

Such excitement in this morning’s scanning meeting as the team pored over the papers trying to spot the April Fools stories. This year seemed to yield more stories than ever before with several clever advertisers getting in on the act as well.

Granted, in some papers it wasn’t so easy to spot which were the April Fools stories and which just fell under the normal brand of ridiculous reporting, with some of our colleagues even convinced that certain papers did not have any irregular features in them…slightly embarrassing not to spot that the Circle Line is probably not going to be home to another Hadron Collider. What?! It was early!

Anyway we thought we would do a roundup of everything we found - have we missed anything!?

Labour’s election strategy: bring on no-nonsense hard man Gordon Brown - The Guardian

Experts find way to stop us ageing - Daily Express

Labour’s election strategy: bring on no-nonsense hard man Gordon Brown - Guardian

If we are to believe The Daily Mirror and the Daily Express, our Majesty has fallen on tough times, and has taken to Flying with EasyJet…be honest - you did have to look twice!

Meanwhile, The Sun wondered how many people might be tempted by a lick of paper, the Daily Mail wowed us with stories of the AA’s new breakdown service.

In France it’s much simpler. Just pin a picture of a fish on someone’s back…. Poisson d’Avril!

For a full list of today’s Fleet St Foolery, click here.

Google has finally left the Chinese market for search, so I thought I would try the alternative Baidu. My trial is gloriously unscientific in nature and not particularly rigorous. I did what most consumers would have done and searched for myself.

I was quite open-minded about this, on the one hand Google has been killing the search market in Europe, nothing can touch it in the EU and they have made moderately successful forays into other sectors as well. I also know that Google is not all conquering, in fact the wheels start to come off the wagon when you venture into areas with non-Roman languages such as Russian, Korean, Japanese and Chinese.

On the other hand, Robin Li over at Baidu is no slouch. Baidu is famous for its huge index and its continued appetite to crawl content whenever and wherever it can find it.

Baidu like its Korean counterpart Naver has also managed to develop a successful social search product running a question-and-answer service like a better version of Yahoo! Answers - largely free of spam and a more middle-class range of participants provide highly relevant quality content.

It is also blatantly obvious that Baidu doesn’t care whether it attracts a potential English-speaking audience as the entire site apart from investor relations is in Chinese.

Methodology

• I searched for “Ged Carroll” on Google’s Hong Kong service and Baidu.com.
• Then I ran the same search on Google Japan and Baidu’s Japanese service.

Outcomes

I was expecting some divergence between Google and Baidu search engine results pages for a number of reasons. Google crawls an estimated 15 per cent of the total web, and Baidu is likely to crawl a slightly larger amount. That means that their search indexes are likely to be slightly different. Secondly the results are usually ‘flavoured’ according to local market preferences such as language and local content.

I was a bit surprised at the level of divergence between Google and Baidu, which was great than I had seen between Google and Yahoo! in the past.

First of all flavouring. A comparison between the Japanese and Chinese versions of Baidu show a high degree of variance between the two versions of the Baidu search engine.

Part of the reason for the difference may be due to Chinese regulations around permitted services, for instance an educational video of me by Econsultancy on YouTube is the top result on the Japanese site and a couple of twitter related hits come in at six and seven. The Japanese site skews much more toward video services than the Chinese site which picked up profile services Plaxo and Naymz.

Interestingly, the Chinese site picked up the re-direct URI for my blog (renaissancechambara.com), whereas neither the Japanese or the Chinese versions picked up my proper domain (renaissancechambara.jp) at all. Even when I clicked a few pages down.

Plotting Baidu China against Google Hong Kong produced an interesting diversity of the results.

Their one point of correlation, my profile on Naymz. Again part of this may be because of my presence on services that don’t do business in China for instance YouTube and Twitter. Google rightly puts more weight and a consequently higher ranking on my Crunchbase and LinkedIn profiles than Plaxo which appears a couple of pages down on Google.

Baidu obviously puts much more emphasis on a historic redirect URI I have for my blog than the ‘real’ one and doesn’t seem to crawl the site in any great depth. I am guessing that this is because of its largely English language content.

In Japan, the Baidu | Google comparison told a similar story. The Google flavouring between Hong Kong and Japanese versions wasn’t that great only showing differences at position five and lower on the page. Baidu Japan managed to pick up my last.fm profile and twitter profile, but didn’t pick up my blog or any professional information on the first page.

In conclusion, Baidu provides a great search experience for consumers, but am uncertain how valuable it would be for people in a professional context, for instance researching foreigners with whom they may be doing business or finding foreign presentations. I can understand why Chinese scientific audiences would be concerned by the departure of Google.

I also suspect that optimising content to make it searchable on Baidu is different to the process that I would go through for Google or Yahoo!, but that would merit far more investigation before I could blog with any confidence about it. This is cross-posted from my personal blog.

It was proclaimed yesterday in the Daily Mail that ‘Junk food is as addictive as heroin’.  The word EXAGGERATION springs to mind.  Not that I doubt the scientific credentials of the research, but comparing our love for chocolate cake to smack, do you not think that’s a bit of a stretch?  Have you ever heard of someone who’d been mugged by an addict to feed his Milky Way habit or a corner shop raided for its Curly Wurlys?  Perhaps it’s time we stopped using the term addict so liberally, because I’m pretty sure I could be accused of being addicted to Bacon Frazzles and Ribena. 

Google UK Budget realtime update module, originally uploaded by renaissancechambara.

Google.co.uk searches for information on today’s budget featured a real-time scrolling box of the latest news and analysis appearing. Usually you may see this for tweets but rarely for news items.

The main points of the Budget as announced are as follows:

ECONOMY

• The economy is expected to grow between at 1 and 1.5% in 2010
• Growth forecast for 2011 revised to between 3% and 3.5%
• VAT, income tax or National Insurance to remain at present rates
• Borrowing will be £167bn this year - £11bn lower than the forecast of £178b
• Debt will be £100bn lower by 2013/14 than predicted at last year’s Budget
• One third of civil service jobs to be located away from London 

TAX:

• Stamp Duty threshold will be raised to £250,000 - nine out of ten first-time buyers will not be liable for Stamp Duty
• Stamp Duty on homes worth £1m increased to 5%
• The planned 3p increase in fuel duty will be phased - up by 1p in April, 1p in October and 1p in January 2011
• Alcohol duty will rise by 2% above inflation by 2013
• Duty on cider will go up by 10% above inflation from Sunday
• Duty on tobacco will increase by 1% above inflation immediately, then 2% in subsequent years
• Inheritance tax will be frozen for four years
• Tax agreements extended to three additional countries - Dominica, Grenada and Belize, to target tax evasion

PENSIONERS:

• The Government will consider scrapping the compulsory retirement age
• Pensioners’ higher winter fuel payment will continue next yea

BANKS:

• Everyone in the UK is to be guaranteed access to a bank account
• The Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds will lend £94bn to business - at least half to small and medium-sized firms.
• The Government will set up a Green Bank controlling £2bn of equity to focus on investing in greener, cleaner energy and transport

BUSINESS:

• Business rates will be cut for a year from October bringing a tax reduction for 500,000 small firms in England
• £2.5bn support for small business to boost skills and innovation
• Investment allowance for small firms doubled to £100,000
• £385m will be invested to maintain road network

FAMILIES:

• Families with one and two-year-olds will receive an extra £4 a week in child tax credits

More reaction to follow.