The European Union has formally announced it suspects X, previously known as Twitter, of breaching its rules in areas including countering illegal content and disinformation.

Digital commissioner Thierry Breton set out the alleged infringements in a post on the social media platform.

He said X, which is owned by Elon Musk, was also suspected of breaching its obligations on transparency.

X said it was “co-operating with the regulatory process”.

In a statement the firm said it was “important that this process remains free of political influence and follows the law”.

“X is focused on creating a safe and inclusive environment for all users on our platform, while protecting freedom of expression, and we will continue to work tirelessly towards this goal,” it added.

In October the EU said it was investigating X over the possible spread of terrorist and violent content, and hate speech, after Hamas’ attack on Israel.

X said then that it had removed hundreds of Hamas-affiliated accounts from the platform.

The investigation was the first under the EU’s new tech rules.

Under a piece of legislation introduced in August, the Digital Services Act (DSA), big tech firms operating in the EU have beefed up obligations to protect users.

Breaches can result in huge fines or services being suspended.

Read more:
EU takes action against Elon Musk’s X over disinformation

USB2U’s branded tech products are an excellent way to make a fantastic first impression and lay the foundations of long-lasting relationships with clients, suppliers, and business partners alike.

Not only that, but by providing custom tech products you are also able to increase your brand awareness simply and effectively. This increased visibility and brand recognition can also lead to even more business opportunities, a high business return, and even more than that.

Depending on the chosen product, your logo could be branded with LED Branding, engraving, or even digital print. These branding styles expose your brand to your clients and other potential customers in the best light possible, and they also provide insight into what your organisation represents.

In addition, USB2U’s extensive product range offers smart, connected tech products that are not only durable, they are high quality, and also perfect tools for increasing business productivity and efficiency.

Learn more about USB2U’S extensive promotional product range here:

1.    The Ultimate XL Gift Set

The Ultimate XL Gift Set is a popular choice for brands who want to make a great impression on all their clients. It features a high-capacity power bank, the Pro 10,000 Power Bank, the incredible Cube Speaker, and the Promotional 3 in 1 Cable.

The Pro 10000 has a generous 10,000mAh battery capacity and two USB charging ports. It’s a perfect product for those who want to charge two devices simultaneously. The Promotional 3 in 1 Cable features USB-C, Micro USB, and Lightning connectors to charge various devices. It’s a lightweight tech product, making it a must-have travel companion for your clients.

The Cube Speaker boasts an impressive light and compact design, and it offers seamless sound quality. The speaker can connect to your client’s device either through Bluetooth or the line audio cable (provided) and can also play music from a Micro-SD card thanks to its built-in port.

This gift set is also available in black and it can be branded with any logo or chosen design. It’s a brilliant way to say thank you to your clients.

2.    Bamboo 10000 Solar Power Bank

The Bamboo 10000 Solar Power Bank is another excellent choice that will leave a lasting impression on your clients. It’s new to USB2U’s range of eco-friendly tech products, and it boasts plenty of fantastic features for your clients to enjoy.

What makes this power bank truly stand out is the fact that it features a built-in solar panel that boosts power using solar energy, and it’s also made from FSC-certified Bamboo. This makes it a top choice for businesses looking to move away from plastic promotional products and move into sustainable alternatives.

In addition, this power bank offers your clients an excellent battery capacity of 10000mAh, a stylish design, and it also boasts ample space for engraving or logo printing.

3.    LED Ultra 8000 Power Bank

The brand-new LED Ultra 8000 Power Bank stands as a superior power bank for several reasons. For starters, it features LED branding which will brilliantly illuminate your logo or designs in bright white light. This also makes it such a perfect marketing tool because your clients or potential customers will always see your logo being advertised in the best light possible.

What’s more, it features a high capacity 8000 mAh battery, a sleek and smooth black finish, and it’s also made from R-ABS plastic (Recycled Claim Standard).

Read more:
Leave a Lasting Impression on all Your Clients With USB2U’s Branded Tech Products

Elon Musk’s X has reinstated the accounts of far-Right influencers Katie Hopkins and Tommy Robinson, reversing lifetime bans on the pair imposed by the social network’s previous ownership.

Ms Hopkins and Mr Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, were reinstated after Mr Musk responded to a tweet which pointed that out they remained banned from the platform.

Mr Musk on Sunday said: “Why are their account handles on this platform? Free speech is allowed, provided laws are not broken.”

The decision comes days after Twitter chief Linda Yaccarino held meetings with advertising executives in London in an effort to lure them back to the platform. Companies have pulled advertising from Twitter over concerns about a roll-back of moderation policies and amid nervousness about Mr Musk’s mercurial management style.

Ms Hopkins was permanently suspended in 2020 for what Twitter said was a violation of its hateful conduct policy.

She previously posted claims that a photo showing the body of a Syrian child on a Turkish beach was staged and also tweeted “we need a final solution” after the Manchester bombings.

She left the radio station LBC shortly after the latter post in 2017 and also parted ways with Mail Online soon after.

Twitter did not say which posts triggered her ban.

Mr Robinson was banned from the platform in 2018 after tweeting “Islam promotes killing people”.

Mr Musk, who has described himself as a “free speech absolutist”, has reinstated many controversial accounts since buying Twitter for $44bn (£36bn) a year ago.

That includes Donald Trump, who had been permanently suspended after the US Capitol riots in January 2021, and the rapper Kanye West, who was suspended for antisemitic posts.

In response to a post which celebrated Ms Hopkins’ reinstatement and blamed her original ban on pressure from campaign group the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), Mr Musk tweeted “CCDH is an evil propaganda machine”.

Mr Musk has a long-running feud with the CCDH and Twitter, now called X, has sued the organisation over claims it embarked on a “scare campaign” to deter advertisers.

After her ban was lifted, Ms Hopkins tweeted: “Thank you @elonmusk. And thank you to all the Twitter family who have brought Tommy & I back to @X. Know this. You are not alone. We are many. And we are stronger together. The fight back for your freedom is on.”

Mr Robinson tweeted: “I am grateful to @elonmusk for giving me my voice back at such an important time. I’ve been censored, attacked, slandered & imprisoned for shining a light on uncomfortable truths that our government wish to hide, the public are now aware I was telling the truth. We have lots to do.”

Mr Robinson was jailed in 2019 after being found in contempt of court for livestreaming footage of defendants in a criminal trial despite a reporting ban.

Read more:
Elon Musk reinstates Katie Hopkins and Tommy Robinson to his social platform X

Over sixty per cent of UK marketers believe consumer segmentation – the categorisation of customers based on shared traits – is an outdated method of marketing, with 63% considering it totally unfit for purpose.

That’s according to new research from enterprise customer data platform, Treasure Data. This is despite almost all (96%) marketers in the UK still using segmentation within their organisations – even though its effectiveness is being called so clearly into question.

The findings, which surveyed 500 UK marketers, found that whilst 86% of respondents update their customer segmentations at least every two years, well over half (56%) still struggle to target their audiences effectively.

And marketers think this new challenge is a result of consumers becoming trickier to understand, with two thirds (66%) concerned that consumer behaviour has become more complicated since the pandemic.

In fact, with easy access to more information and choice than ever before – especially online – priorities, preferences and purchasing habits now have potential to change at any given moment. Almost three quarters now agree it’s hard to group consumers into one segment because they’re always evolving.

The new era of targeting through consumer ‘situationships’

With this research exposing the shortfalls in traditional customer segmentation methods, Treasure Data is calling upon brands to rethink their approach and instead aim to make use of first party data to ‘segment by situationship’ in real time.

In its new report, ‘Better Decisions: The era of consumer situationships ’, situationships are defined as a momentary mindset based on an individual’s current mood, needs, priorities and circumstances.

Treasure Data further surveyed 2000 adults in the UK to gauge the modern consumer mindset, finding that many consumers in fact flit between mindsets or ‘situationships’, derived from numerous behavioural traits. The most popular of these momentary mindsets included ‘Family Firsts’, ‘Safe shoppers’, ‘Infrequent buyers’, ‘Purpose shoppers’ and ‘Seasonal Spikers’.

First party data to pin down consumers in real time

The report highlights prevailing gaps in the data management strategies within many brands, with 64% of UK marketers admitting that data blind spots are preventing them from getting a full picture of their customers. And with four in ten marketers (39%) recognising that consumers will opt-out of sharing their data with brands they don’t trust to handle it properly, marketers look set to struggle with elevating their segmentation efforts.

Commenting on the report findings, Director of Marketing EMEA and India at Treasure Data, Andrew Stephenson said:

“The findings of this research validate what we knew to be true – that outdated models of segmentation which fix consumers into rigid and permanent groups simply don’t work. And marketers will face an urgent problem if they don’t take the need for better first party data seriously.

“If they are to have a real time, fluid and evolving understanding of their customers, then brands must look to eliminate data blindspots, access and invest in data security measures to win consumers trust and from there, achieve the gold standard of targeting; segmentation by mindset and situation.”

Read more:
Over half of UK marketers believe consumer segmentation is an outdated and oversimplified marketing method 

Elon Musk has suggested that all users of X, formerly called Twitter, may have to pay for access to the platform.

In a conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the billionaire said a payment system was the only way to counter bots.

“We’re moving to having a small monthly payment for use of the system,” the Tesla and SpaceX boss said.

It is unclear whether this was just an off-the-cuff comment, or a signal of firmer plans that have yet to be announced.

Mr Musk has long said that his solution for getting rid of bots and fake accounts on the social media platform is charging for verification.

Since taking over Twitter last year he has looked to incentivise users to pay for an enhanced service, which is now called X Premium.

This has been done by giving paid subscribers more features, like longer posts and increased visibility on the platform.

However, users can currently still use X for free.

Although there is a clear financial interest for the company to charge users, Mr Musk insisted that getting people to pay for the service is aimed at tackling bots.

“A bot costs a fraction of a penny” to make he said. “But if somebody even has to pay a few dollars or something, some minor amount, the effective cost to bots is very high”.

X Premium currently costs $8 (£6.50) a month in the US. The price differs depending on which country a subscriber is in.

The world’s richest person said that he was now looking at cheaper options for users.

“We’re actually going to come up with a lower tier pricing. So we just want it to be just a small amount of money,” he said.

“This is a longer discussion, but in my view, this is actually the only defence against vast armies of bots,” Mr Musk added.

However, a risk is that by putting X behind a paywall it may lose a large chunk of its users. That in turn, could drive down advertising revenue, which currently accounts for the vast majority of the company’s income.

Mr Musk’s conversation with the Israeli prime minister also touched on antisemitism on X.

The platform has been accused by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) campaign group of not doing enough to stop antisemitic content.

In a statement, the organisation said that Mr Musk was “engaging with and elevating” antisemites.

Earlier this month, he said that the company would sue the ADL to “clear our platform’s name”.

In the conversation with Mr Netanyahu, Mr Musk reiterated that he was “against antisemitism”.

Mr Netanyahu accepted the balance between free speech and content moderation was a challenge but urged Mr Musk to get the balance right.

“I hope you find within the confines of the First Amendment, the ability to stop not only antisemitism… but any collective hatred of people that antisemitism represents,” he said.

“I know you’re committed to that”, Mr Netanyahu added.

Read more:
Elon Musk suggests social media platform X could go behind paywall

Over the past years, influencers have become one of the top choices for social media marketers, providing brands an opportunity to reach millions of potential users practically overnight.

The rising popularity of influencers has boosted the total spending in this market to record highs.

According to data presented by OnlyAccounts.io, brands have spent a whopping $90bn on influencer ads in the past five years.

Ad Spending in the Influencer Market Skyrocketed by 400% Since 2017

Marketers use influencer advertising because it is effective. The strong bond between influencers and their followers helps them to raise brand awareness, increase reach, traffic, and sales and improve engagement. At the same time, precise targeting and performance monitoring bring a higher investment return for each campaign. The State of Influencer Marketing 2023 report showed that most brands, or around 40%, work with up to ten influencers.

With budgets growing fast and marketers seeing strong returns and increased customer trust, the total ad spending on this type of ad skyrocketed in the past five years. According to a Statista survey, brands and companies spent roughly $6bn on influencer advertising in 2017. Three years later, this figure jumped to over $16bn. Statistic show 2021 saw the biggest year-over-year growth, with the annual spending on influencer ads jumping by almost 40% to $22.3bn.

Last year, companies and brands spent another $26.3bn, despite market growth slowing down. Statista expects this figure to grow by 17% to $30.8bn in 2023, showing a massive 400% increase since 2017. By 2027, the total ad spending in the influencer market will touch almost $48bn.

Chinese, US, and UK Brands Make Two-Thirds of Total Ad Spending

Although brands worldwide use influencer ads to promote their products and services, most ad spending comes from only three countries. China, the world`s largest and fastest-growing influencer advertising market, has the biggest share in total ad spending. Between 2017 and 2022, Chinese brands spent a whopping $49bn on this type of advertising, far more than any other country. Statista expects this figure to grow by a further $16.7bn in 2023.

Total ad spending in the US influencer advertising market, the second-largest globally, is expected to hit nearly $5bn in 2023 after brands already spending $15.7bn in the past five years. The United Kingdom follows with $2.8bn in five-year spending and another $1bn worth of influencer ads expected this year.

Statistics show the three countries generate two-thirds of total ad spending in the influencer advertising industry.

Read more:
Brands Spent a Whopping $90B on Influencer Ads in Five Years

Marketing is a matter of storytelling and what’s better than using a story that your customers already know and love?

With the new release of Spongebob bath bombs and soaps from Lush Cosmetics, the concept of nostalgia marketing is being brought back into the limelight.

Nostalgia marketing is one of the great tools big companies are using to keep hold of their loyal customers and to grab the attention of others. But how can you use nostalgia marketing to your benefit?

Why nostalgia works

Nostalgia works as a marketing technique that appeals to your customer’s emotions. It gives your customers a feeling of longing and a reminder of fond memories, making your product stick in their minds as something comparable to that happiness. Familiar faces, such as characters from childhood, can be one way of encouraging this longing, reminding your customer of happy times.

Alice Cass, Digital and Social Marketer at UK Greetings, says: “Investing in the characters known and loved by your customer demographic is the perfect way to incorporate nostalgia into your marketing and business strategy. Nostalgia marketing is an excellent tool, bridging the gap between the past and present evoking a sense of familiarity and trust between a business and its customers.”

According to the Harvard Business Review, studies conducted on nostalgia show that customers desire money less after a nostalgic event – meaning they are more likely to spend more when reminded of happy times.

Nostalgic characters can include Groovy Chic from the 1990s, Boofle from the mid-late 2000s who has become recognisable during birthdays and special celebrations and special celebrations, and classic cartoon characters such as Scooby Doo, the Rugrats, and other recognisable faces.

Even big brands like Coco Cola, Nintendo, and McDonalds have been known to jump on the nostalgia marketing hype – seeing results through bringing their history and their customers’ childhoods into their brands.

What counts as “nostalgic”?

Well, this depends on your target customer, recent nostalgia marketing has focused on  the late ‘90s, with Generation Z being the front runners in commanding the trend, despite them not being born during this time period.

The icons of this time persist as a brilliant way to market your business, having a profound impact on your customer.

In short, nostalgia is something that reminds someone of the past – and while it usually is of their past, it doesn’t have to be. Stories from parent’s past, for example, can be just as effective. Popular shows like Stranger Things are helping to boost this desire for nostalgia, even during a time period many of the watchers might not remember, the ‘80s.

How to bring nostalgia into your business

Marketing

Harnessing the nostalgic power of these characters and time periods can be done by developing them into your marketing strategy. However, it is important to note that characters likely have a trademark and copyright against them, so gaining appropriate licensing is a must.

Whether posting online content or hosting in-house events for children, your characters can come to life and help promote your business. Perhaps, your bar has Groovy Chick Thursdays as Groovy Chick herself hands out cocktail discounts nearby, for example.

Products

Your products can even have a classic character or nostalgic twist to them. Whether this is a greeting card featuring your favourite childhood characters, such as Elliot & Buttons or Bubblegum, or you commemorate a time in history with your products.

Companies such as Adidas have used the nostalgia marketing technique in their own trainers. As part of the 45th anniversary of Billie Jean King’s iconic tennis win, Adidas launched their own trainers with her face and initials on. This campaign saw a 20% boost in shoe sales during the time – showing the customer desire to be connected to history.

Company history

Another way to bring nostalgia into your businessis by bringing the past into the present. Customers love a good throwback, so why not embrace this trend by highlighting the amazing history that your own company has.

Whether it is a long family history that started the business off right or a collection of previous partnerships which bring back a friendly reminder – your business could have a lot of inspiration to draw from.

Nostalgia has been proven to make customers want to spend more, but implementing this into your marketing strategy isn’t so easy. Some companies go down the route of paying for copyright licensing for characters, while others bring their own history into the mix to promote a community feeling within their customers. Whichever route you choose, investing in some nostalgia not only appeals to your customers’ emotions but also to their wallets.

Read more:
Nostalgia Marketing: How to Implement Emotion into Your Business

The Barbie movie, it’s everywhere – from social media memes to the temporarily-renamed Barbie-can Centre.

Praised for its witty marketing and seemingly endless barrage of promotions leading up to the release date, Barbie has now grossed over $400 million worldwide after less than a week in cinemas. The movie’s extremely successful marketing campaign has seen the movie achieve the highest opening day sales of any movie this year.

While it’s undeniable that Barbie’s massive $100 million marketing budget played a part in the triumph of these campaigns, the real genius lies in the strategies utilised by Barbie’s marketing team; building meme generators and social media filters, pushing brand identity and nostalgia-marketing, and getting people involved in their interactive campaigns – strategies that are equally relevant to SMEs.

Marketing is a powerful tool that can boost brand awareness and attract new customers, and there is a lot that business leaders can learn from the overwhelming success of the Barbie movie’s marketing attempts.

Connor Campbell, business expert at NerdWallet comments: “There is no doubt that the Barbie movie has seen some of the most effective marketing in recent years. Opening to staggeringly high box office numbers, the movie has been able to transfer its marketing virality into direct sales – something that is equally desirable for small businesses in the UK.

“The secrets to the movie’s success lay in the marketing team’s ability to create a ‘moment’ that masses of people want to be part of. By playing to their strengths of pushing the strong identity of Barbie as a brand – utilising hot pink and iconic fonts, alongside appealing to nostalgia – the Barbie marketing team have generated significant buzz and anticipation ahead of the movie’s release.

“While SMEs are unlikely to have the budget potential that the Barbie team were given, these are all methods that can inspire the way in which small businesses market themselves and build brand awareness in the wider public – optimising the power of social media virality to build interactive campaigns that people want to participate in.”

Connor has shared the following tips to help businesses take inspiration from the Barbie marketing victories:

Create interactive social media content

One of the main reasons that the Barbie movie hit such high levels of viral popularity is through their strategic use of interactive social media content. This has taken the form of meme generators – such as the ‘This Barbie is a…’ generator that allows users to transform photos of themselves into Barbie-themed posters, and the Barbie-related filters on TikTok and Instagram.

By directly getting people involved and providing them with a ‘memento’, this encourages them to want to take part. This can be in the form of creating a filter or sound that others can use to create their own pictures or videos, or could even be done by jumping on pre-existing trends and giving them a twist that relates to your business.

Social media is a great way for businesses to promote themselves to a wider audience, and creating interactive campaigns increases the chances of going viral – particularly on platforms such as TikTok that are known to have a very user-friendly algorithm.

Brand identity is key

The Barbie movie utilised a wide range of marketing strategies – from social media to offline collaborations with other brands across different industries. However, what tied all of these together was the consistency of Barbie’s brand identity.

Over the years, Barbie has become synonymous with its hot pink colour palette and instantly recognisable font. These elements have been carried across each of the marketing tactics used, and mean that people can immediately recognise trending content as being Barbie-related.

In a similar way, businesses can ensure that they have a strong brand identity of their own. Whether this is through having an instantly recognisable logo, or carrying across a core colour palette in everything you do. Every marketing campaign – whether it’s large-scale billboards or simple Instagram posts – should carry across these elements of brand identity to make your business synonymous with these factors.

Building up to a “main event” while maintaining an event

In Barbie’s case, the “main event” was always the release of the movie in cinemas. Everything the marketing team did up until this point was solely to generate buzz for the main attraction. In this way, businesses should optimise their marketing efforts in the lead-up to a new product or service launch, hinting that something big is coming, and focusing their attention on creating traction for the launch.

However, where the Barbie movie marketing team really excelled was in making the build-up just as much of an event as the movie release itself. The general public knew that the movie was being released on the 21st July, but they were equally as invested and excited about what the movie’s marketing team were doing now – prior to the launch.

Businesses can use this same strategy to make their business more exciting to a wider audience. By putting out frequent social media posts, trending hashtags, and generating conversations in the build-up to the launch of a new venture, businesses can capitalise on this tactic to create two “main events” – one now, and one when the launch takes place.

Making nostalgia-marketing work for you

Nostalgia is an extremely powerful emotion that can be used to appeal to potential consumers. By relating to them and relaying shared memories, businesses can create positive associations with their target demographic. For the Barbie movie, the brand itself is a nostalgic household name for multiple generations. However, this doesn’t mean that small businesses can’t still utilise nostalgia-marketing for themselves.

The secret to successful nostalgia-marketing is really understanding your audience. Identify a core demographic that you’re aiming to target, and make sure you fully understand their core cultural and historical background from their childhood or early adulthood.

If your small business has a lot of history itself, you may be able to incorporate elements from your brand history that overlap with this era. If not, there are still other ways to incorporate nostalgia into your marketing. This could take the form of creating a nostalgic hashtag to use for your social media posts, or launching a limited-time deal that is relevant to an event that took place that month, week, or even day in history.

Read more:
Business expert shares top tips SMEs can learn from the Barbie movie marketing team

Business owners are being urged to wait and see before signing up to the new social network Threads in case they get tangled up in pursuing a strategy that does nothing to serve their interests.

UK marketing agency JDR Group, based in Derby, says companies could lose precious time and derail their sales campaigns if they succumb to the lure of Meta’s latest online platform without proper planning.

Threads has caused a worldwide sensation since its launch as a rival to micro-messaging platform Twitter, with 150 million new users having already signed up.

Among a flurry of headlines, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s direct competitor to billionaire Elon Musk’s Twitter had many people announcing they were abandoning Twitter in favour of Threads, leading digital experts to speculate over whether the famous blue bird’s days were numbered.

But Will Williamson, a director at JDR Group, which looks after the online marketing for hundreds of companies across the country, says firms who currently rely on established social networks should resist the temptation to join the stampede – for now.

Threads definitely has potential, he adds, and there are benefits to get on board early, not least because it is easiest to build followers and get engagement in the early days before the site’s algorithm start to prioritise adverts.

But equally there is the danger that it may not be compatible with their business needs or is not likely to be used by their potential customers.

And experts – including Meta with its failed Horizons World VR project – have been wrong about the next best thing before and it might be that the latest online sensation won’t come from America at all, but from China, with a new app from the makers of TikTok called Lemon8 waiting in the wings and steadily growing its own new following.

Will said: “There is always a sense of panic every time a new social media platform launches with everyone wondering if they should get involved and what might happen to their business if they were to miss out.

“There’s no doubt Threads has made a huge impact and has vast potential. However, we all remember other social media platforms which arrived in a burst of publicity but which never fulfilled their promise, including Google Plus, which plenty of people thought would be the next big thing.

“I understand companies wanting to seek any advantage that might be gained, but our advice is that they should be cautious and do their research before getting involved.

“Social media takes time and investment and every minute and pound you spend on it is precious and so we wouldn’t advise opening an account on Threads until there is certainty about whether it’s right for your business.”

Social media has become one of the main marketing tools for businesses over the years and there are now plenty of ways in which companies can harness the power of social media in order to grow their brands.

Will added: “The huge success of Meta and TikTok may well mean that Threads and Lemon8 have potential to become really important, however I think the days of huge subscriber numbers are over because platforms are becoming more specialised and serving distinct niches.

“From having three or four giant social media platforms 10 years ago, I would say there are now 50 available, 20 of which we are actively aware of and with new ones coming along all the time.

“It means that companies need to understand who their customers are and find the social media platform that is meeting their needs the best. As ever with anything that’s new, it’s always wise to seek advice and hold off doing anything drastic.”

Read more:
SMEs told to think ahead before tying up with social media platform Threads

Meta’s Twitter rival, Threads, logged five million sign-ups in its first four hours of operation, according to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, as the company seeks to woo users from Elon Musk’s troubled platform through an offer of lengthier posts, a handful of celebrity backers – and a strong resemblance to its competitor.

The Facebook and Instagram owner brought forward the app’s debut by 15 hours to 7pm EDT in the US and midnight in the UK, making it freely available in 100 countries on the Apple and Google app stores, although regulatory concerns mean it will not be available in the EU.

Brands such as Billboard, HBO, NPR and Netflix, and even us here at Business Matters had accounts set up within minutes of launch. Meta said initial celebrity backers included Shakira and Gordon Ramsay, with a recent report suggesting that Oprah Winfrey and the Dalai Lama had also been approached.

Thread users will need an Instagram account to log in. Once they have signed up, they can choose to follow the same accounts they follow on Instagram, if they too have joined the new app.

The app closely resembles Twitter visually, although some of the wording has been changed, with retweets called “reposts” and tweets called “threads”. Meta has not been averse to copying rival products in the past, including the 2020 launch of Instagram’s Reels feature, noted for its similarity to TikTok’s short-form videos.

Posts on Threads can be 500 characters long, compared with 280 for most Twitter users, and videos of up to five minutes in length can be posted while a post can be shared as a link on other platforms. Users can unfollow, block, restrict or report others. Users can also filter out replies with certain words in them.

Meta has launched Threads in the wake of another turbulent period at Twitter, which imposed tweet viewing limits at the weekend in a move it blamed partly on data harvesting by companies building artificial intelligence models.

In subsequent Threads posts, Zuckerberg addressed those challenges. “I think there should be a public conversations app with 1 billion+ people on it. Twitter has had the opportunity to do this but hasn’t nailed it. Hopefully we will,” he wrote.

Reaction to the debut on Wednesday ranged from caution to enthusiasm, many praising its ease of use and some saying that Elon Musk should be worried. Others pointed out the app’s speedy integration with Instagram showed just how powerful Meta has become. Much of the conversation, ironically, took place on Twitter, where the hashtag “Threads” was trending on Wednesday evening.

News of Zuckerberg’s impending unveiling of Threads had resulted in the Facebook founder and Musk apparently agreeing to a cage fight over the matter, although a date has not been set for the unlikely confrontation.

Meta described Threads as a “new, separate space for real-time updates and public conversations”, aiming to “take what Instagram does best and expand that to text, creating a positive and creative space to express your ideas”. Twitter has a user base of more than 250 million, while Instagram reportedly has 2 billion users.

Meta said the app would also resemble Twitter’s rivals such as Mastodon, which is based on a decentralised platform that would allow accounts to be transferred to other services. It said: “We are working toward making Threads compatible with the open, interoperable social networks that we believe can shape the future of the internet.”

Meta said it was planning to make Threads compatible with ActivityPub, technology that also underpins Mastodon and allows social networks to be interoperable, which would let users of Threads take their accounts and followers to other ActivityPub-supported apps.

Meta said users could stop using the Threads app and transfer their content to another service that uses the same underlying technology – such as Mastodon. “Our vision is that people using compatible apps will be able to follow and interact with people on Threads without having a Threads account, and vice versa, ushering in a new era of diverse and interconnected networks.” As with Mastodon, Meta envisages mini-communities forming with their own community standards and moderation policies.

Currently, the main feed is a mixture of content that users follow, as well as content recommended from the algorithm. There are currently no plans to allow people to limit that to only people they follow. People will keep their usernames from Instagram, reducing the possibility of people name-squatting high profile usernames.

Mindful of criticism from politicians and campaigners over the safety of children on its platform, Meta is defaulting every UK Threads user under 18 to a private profile that can only be viewed by people the user approves.

Mike Proulx, research director at the analysis firm Forrester, said Threads was “yet another” copycat move but had been launched at a time of “peak Twitter frustration”, although the marketplace for rivalling Twitter was already flooded with alternatives such as Hive, Bluesky and Mastodon. “This only serves to fracture the Twitter alternative-seeking user base,” he said.

Read more:
Instagram owner’s Twitter rival, Threads, logs 5 million users in first hours

Google could be forced to sell parts of its $224.5 billion advertising business after the European Commission found that the tech giant had been abusing its dominant position in the sector.

The search engine business has been accused of conduct that may have foreclosed rivals and enabled the company to charge high fees for its services.

The commission has concluded that a forced sale of part of its advertising business may be required to restore competition after finding that Google abused its position for almost a decade.

Brussels alleged that Google had intentionally distorted the market and warned that requiring the company to change its behaviour rather than sell off parts of its business would be “ineffective”. But it said its conclusions were preliminary at this stage.

Dan Taylor, Google’s vice-president for advertising, said: “Google remains committed to creating value for our publisher and advertiser partners in this highly competitive sector. The commission’s investigation focuses on a narrow aspect of our advertising business and is not new. We disagree with the EC’s view and we will respond accordingly.”

European regulators have so far stopped short of breaking up Google and have instead levied the company with billions in fines for antitrust violations. But global efforts to regulate the technology giants have started picking up pace.

The UK competition watchdog is also looking to take action on Google and Facebook’s dominance of the online advertising sector. The Competition and Markets Authority’s new digital markets unit has been set up to stop large Silicon Valley tech companies abusing their market power.

The regulator’s research has found that Google controlled more than 90 per cent of the advertising revenues generated from internet searches in the UK in 2019. Its study on online advertising has also found that Google extracts up to 30 per cent more surplus from advertisers than its rival, Bing.

The watchdog’s report on Google and Facebook’s market power found the online advertising sector cost about £14 billion in 2019. It said advertising added an additional £500 per household to the costs of goods and services and that these prices were “likely to be higher than they would be in a more competitive market”.

The report said: “Google and Facebook were able to emerge, with limited resources, on the back of a good idea, producing new and innovative services that are highly valued by consumers. However, they are now protected by such strong and self-reinforcing incumbency advantages that similar innovation by new entrants is much more difficult.”

Read more:
EU threatens to break up Google’s $200bn ad business

Crypto firms must warn customers they should not expect protection if their investment goes wrong and introduce a “cooling off” period for first-time investors, under new rules imposed by the UK financial watchdog.

The Financial Conduct Authority said that from 8 October firms promoting crypto products or services would need to carry a clear risk warning in their adverts.

The FCA said an example of such a notification would include telling customers they should not expect protection “if something goes wrong” and ought to be “prepared to lose all the money you invest”. Customers should be urged to “take two mins to learn more”, the FCA added.

Companies advertising crypto assets, including cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, will need to offer a pause to new investors requesting to invest in their products. Bonuses for introducing friends to a crypto firm’s products will also be prohibited.

Sheldon Mills, executive director of consumers and competition at the FCA, said consumers should understand that the crypto industry remains largely unregulated, with the lack of a safety net putting investors at risk of losing all their money.

“It is up to people to decide whether they buy crypto. But research shows many regret making a hasty decision. Our rules give people the time and the right risk warnings to make an informed choice,” he said.

“Consumers should still be aware that crypto remains largely unregulated and high risk. Those who invest should be prepared to lose all their money.”

The FCA said research showed that estimated crypto ownership in the UK more than doubled between 2021 and 2022. According to an FCA-commissioned survey, 10% of respondents said they owned crypto assets.

The watchdog has also warned that cryptoasset fraud is on the rise, with reports of crypto scams climbing from 1,619 in 2019 to 6,372 in 2021.

The FCA said some crypto promotions had already been censured by the Advertising Standards Authority including an advert by Luno, a cryptocurrency exchange, that appeared on the London Underground and London bus networks that said: “If you’re seeing Bitcoin on the Underground, it’s time to buy.”

The ASA also ruled in 2021 that a Facebook advert for a fan token issued by Arsenal football club trivialised investing in crypto.

The FCA said the new rules brought crypto in line with a regime introduced last year for misleading adverts related to high-risk investments.

Further regulation is on the way for crypto firms in the UK. In February, the Treasury published a consultation document on bringing crypto regulation in line with traditional assets such as stocks and bonds.

Read more:
Crypto ads will need to carry risk warnings under new UK rules

Twitter CEO Elon Musk said on Saturday that the social media platform will allow media publishers to charge users on a per-article basis with one click, calling it a win for both the public and media organisations.

The feature, to be rolled out in May, will enable users who do not “sign up for a monthly subscription to pay a higher per article price for when they want to read an occasional article”, billionaire owner Musk tweeted.

On Friday, Musk had said that Twitter will take a 10% cut on content subscriptions after the first year, noting that the company will not take a cut for the first 12 months. These subscriptions include long-form text and hours-long video.

Since taking over the social media firm in October, Musk has been bringing in changes to try to boost revenue at Twitter after the social media platform saw advertising income drop last year in the run-up to his on-again-off-again acquisition that closed.

Under Musk’s ownership Twitter has reduced its workforce from 7,500 people to about 1,500, leading to fears that moderation standards and its ability to comply with upcoming European standards would suffer as a consequence.

Twitter has been repeatedly warned that it is not ready for a new European Union regulatory regime for monitoring digital platforms, with breaches risking a fine of 6% of global turnover and, in the most extreme cases, a temporary suspension of the service.

Under the rules for large platforms, they must carry out annual risk assessments outlining the risks of harmful content such as disinformation, misogyny, harms to children and election manipulation. The moderation systems and measures put in place to mitigate those risks will also be checked by the EU.

Platforms will also be banned from building profiles of child users for companies to target them with ads. Those platforms that can be reached by minors must also put in place measures to protect their privacy and keep them safe. Users must also be able to report illegal content easily.

Read more:
Twitter to let publishers charge users per article read, says Elon Musk

Businesses have, over the years, become very adept at dealing with a crisis communications issue.

Nine times out of 10 a company stumbles blindly into a situation via a combination of mistakes and, unfortunately, misses opportunities to nip it in the bud.

This issue, accidental or not, is likely to cost companies large amounts of money in terms of repairing the reputational damage and lost sales and the even worse news is that its legacy, thanks to the internet, can last for a lifetime.

There are a significant number of public relations agencies and consultancies out there that claim to specialise in helping a brand navigate through a crisis. Having worked in PR for a Government utility in the early stages of my career, and then the world’s largest bus and rail company after that, and then an insurance company that, at the time, was the 5th largest company in the world, I have dealt with my own large share of corporate crisis situations.

People like me almost had a tried and tested crisis communications mantra and template that could fit nearly every business and industry. 1. Apologise where you can (without admitting legal liability). 2. Turn off your pro-active communications and marketing until it’s over. 3. Announce an independent, third-party investigation into the issue. 4. Announce the results and learning from that investigation and then, if the crisis was still hitting the headlines move to… 5. Announce one of the C-suite was leaving because of it.

That 5-point plan, passed on from generation to generation of crisis communications specialists, has done us fine until the internet.

The internet has made crisis communications into a far longer and more drawn-out recovery process. It is not just enough to deal with the situation that has happened via media statements and a well-prepared Q&A document of every potential negative question that a journalist may ask. Brands now need to deal with the aftermath, which is negative stories floating around Google for their company name.

I know this only too well having worked with a significant number of companies who have got themselves out of the media storm, only to walk into negative online stories that have affected their sales. Take for example a high street optician that we worked with on a crisis communications brief.

Something went wrong, it blew up into a storm and whilst the immediate media situation was effectively dealt with, the negative articles created a problem. Those bad articles arrived at the top of Google for the brand name, plus when consumers added the word “research” to that name. This was estimated to be costing the company several million pounds of lost revenue every week.

This is where digital public relations can play a vital part in the path out of a modern-day online reputation management situation.

Done correctly, the digital PR machine can flood Google with positive stories about the brand and if the news sites that cover the good news have just as strong, or even stronger a reputation in Google’s eyes, then it can push the negative news down. This is exactly the approach we took with the high street opticians, and it worked.

This is a strategy that is also used in the murky world of political and personal PR. If a negative story is dominating the search engines, then it becomes the job of the digital teams to look at the content and stories causing the issue and work out a plan to come up with similar content, but with a positive vibe.

This new era of extended crisis communications is why so many “traditional” public relations and consultancy firms are failing to grasp the full situation. Not many of these companies fully understand the long-term digital ramifications of a negative scenario.

A strong example of a global brand using digital campaigns to saturate search engines with positive news would be Amazon. It has announced, on several occasions, that it is close to being able to launch drone-based delivery services. The last time it talked about this publicly was to announce a small test was going to be taking place in a town in America.

Every time this story comes out, the global media writes it up. A massive general brand awareness win but also a very clever and successful way of moving anything negative about the brand down the search engine rankings. As an aside, it is interesting to note that both the UK and US aviation authorities have shot down (not literally) talk of drone delivery services happening in the short term. Still, it is a story that works well for Amazon.

Can a small to medium-sized business use this same tactic to help move negative mentions down? Of course they can. All that is needed is a solid news angle, a media database full of contacts and the skills to understand which news websites will have the strongest effect, and this is where digital public relations can come into its own.

Of course, as we say to our clients and customers, it may be an idea to just not do bad things but, as we all know, life is never as straight forward or as simple as that.

Andy Barr is the co-founder and owner of 10 Yetis Digital. The agency has advised large global brands and FTSE organisations on crisis communications scenarios and has similarly worked on these kinds of campaigns for individuals and small businesses alike. Andy has worked on online campaigns for both the major political parties in the UK and advised a Chinese political and business delegation that visited the UK on the West’s approach to handling crisis situations in the media.

Read more:
Crisis communications in the modern era: How dealing with the issue itself is now just a small part of the problem for companies

Huel adverts that claimed its meal replacement shakes could help consumers save money during the cost of living crisis have been banned after the advertising watchdog ruled they were misleading and irresponsible.

One advert, which ran on Facebook in August and September, said the shakes helped “keep money in your pockets”, and claimed an “entire month’s worth of Huel” worked out at less than £50.

The second advert, on the company’s website, was entitled “Five ways to save money on food” and said: “Eating healthily doesn’t need to break the bank.”

The Advertising Standards Authority, which upheld two complaints made against the firm, acknowledged Huel said its products would save money when compared with other expensive convenience foods, but said the adverts did not make that clear.

The ASA also found one portion of Huel contained 400 calories, and in order to meet recommended calorie intakes, it would cost at least £350 a month.

The regulator also found the adverts were irresponsible, as they did not make clear that a traditional diet of three meals a day could not be directly replaced with three portions of Huel while still consuming sufficient calories.

The ASA said: “The ads must not appear in the form complained about. We told Huel to ensure that their ads did not state or imply that eating Huel for all meals instead of a ‘traditional’ diet was cheaper, unless they held adequate substantiation.

“We also told them to ensure their ads did not imply that three portions of Huel per day contained sufficient calories. We told them not to make general health claims unless they were accompanied by a specific authorised health claim.”

Read more:
Huel adverts banned in UK for claiming shakes could help cut food bills

We’re in the middle of the busiest shopping period of the year and, with a billion active monthly users globally, TikTok offers many opportunities for SMEs to get on someone’s wish list this Christmas.

Indeed, 47% of people on TikTok have already purchased something they like on the platform, with the hashtag #TikTokMadeMeBuyIt getting more than 29bn views.

But how can a small business make the most of TikTok to increase sales and grow their business with holiday shopping well underway? Try TikTok for Business.

What is TikTok for Business?

TikTok for Business offers a suite of products that help small businesses grow, target more customers, and drive results. Even though it seems late in the season, it’s never too late to begin a campaign with TikTok For Business.

Take thortful, for example – the UK’s first greeting card marketplace. Earlier this year thortful needed to attract new customers and build awareness of its wide array of cards and gifts. The brand tapped into TikTok’s popular trends and used humour to showcase their products. They reached over 1.7m users, with their videos receiving over 4.4m views.

What are the benefits of TikTok for your SME this Christmas?

People all over the UK turn to TikTok to discover trends, recommendations, and their next purchase throughout the year. It’s no surprise that Christmas shoppers go to TikTok for gift inspiration. 82% of users say they have discovered an SMB on TikTok before seeing them elsewhere. 

TikTok for Business is offering SMEs access to the Holiday Resource Hub, a one-stop shop filled with useful information to help SMEs win the holiday season, including a free playbook with a step-by-step guide to the season including their Christmas checklist.

5-step Christmas checklist:

Before the big day, here are some tips to get your marketing plan in order.

1) Refine creative strategy

Develop a voice on TikTok and determine what you want to show your audience.

It’s a light-hearted platform so it’s ideal for showing off the fun side of your business. Think tips, tricks and comedy shorts – TikTok stats show that three out of five users go to the platform for entertainment so keep that in mind when you’re doing your planning. If you want to keep it more informative, include short information in text overlays around the theme of your video. For example, how a particular child’s toy might be beneficial to their learning with five text overlays explaining why.

Remember, ads that look like native videos do well. Have a play with holiday trends – nothing too polished, though. Users like a casual, authentic image. You could offer fun giveaways or get in on Christmas trends such as decorating the Christmas tree, Christmas wish lists and easy holiday meals.

Turn the sound on too, so that users will feel more engaged!

2) Find and define your audience

TikTok lets you set your parameters to target new users using Ads Manager. Ads Manager can guide the ad formats you use and target your audience based on age, location, gender, interests and other unique variables.

What’s more, you can create custom and lookalike audiences (that share commonalities with your current audience) to expand your range.

3) Set your budget and bidding strategies

Minimum ad spends apply but be clear from the start on how much you want to spend for your ads. If you’re satisfied with your performance, it’s recommended you increase your budget by 20-30 per cent every day.

You set your bidding strategy when you set up your ad group. Find out more about bidding strategies here.

4) Build your ad format strategy

52% of TikTok users that have come across SMB content on TikTok have gone on to make a purchase.

Ads can take many forms on TikTok:

In-Feed Ads:  The standard ad format, embeds a video that plays automatically in the For You feed. This format runs up to a max of 60 seconds.

Spark Ads: A native ad format that allows businesses to boost posts from their own Business Accounts or Creator profiles as In-Feed Ads. Unlike other ad formats, users can interact with Spark Ads, just like organic videos. Users can comment, like and share but also visit the brand’s or the creator’s profile associated with the video.

Collection Ads: Enable people to seamlessly discover and browse products in a full-screen mobile experience. Collection Ads lead to an Instant Gallery Page where people can explore a curated collection of your products.

Lead Generation: Allows you to create interest in your business and collect information to convert prospects into customers. Lead Generation Ads deliver qualified leads directly to you, saving your business time and money.

E-Commerce Integrations: TikTok integrates with e-commerce merchants allowing you to add TikTok as a sales and advertising channel to your website. The Integrations streamlines the process of creating or linking your TikTok Ads Manager account, syncing your product catalogue, and installing the TikTok pixel to enable paid and organic visibility features.

5) Optimise

Allow your campaign time to adjust before rushing into optimisations. Refreshing your creative can help, every 7 days ideally.

Make incremental changes to your bid and budget when you make adjustments. Don’t change your budget more than 30% from the previous budget setting and don’t change your bid more than 20% from the original setting.

Try and optimise before your Christmas ad campaign begins. Check you’re targeting the right audience, re-jigging your ads based on how users interact with them and test constantly to see what does and what doesn’t work.

Read more:
This Christmas, TikTok can help you reach even more customers

TikTok is expected to ride out the advertising slowdown, as the Chinese-owned social media titan becomes an outlier to the wider industry slowdown.

According to a new report published by GroupM, the media buying agency owned by WPP, TikTok doubled its advertising revenue in 2022.

“This has likely been another driver of the advertising deceleration or “pullback” noted at Meta and Snap over and above macroeconomic factors given that we see less deceleration across other digital platforms where TikTok would be a less obvious alternative (such as Microsoft),” the report said.

However, the report reckons that although marketers may choose to view the platform as a good way to reach younger audiences who are becoming increasingly difficult to target via linear TV, there was a caveat that longer term strategies would “come with increased risk of the platform being banned in additional markets”.

Despite boasting over a billion users, TikTok remains banned in India, and continues to receive scrutiny from the UK, US and European Union, especially over data access from China.

GroupM revised its 2023 forecast for total ad spending growth down 0.5 per cent to 5.9 per cent.

Tech analyst at PP Foresight Paolo Pescatore echoed this sentiment, saying: “As its [TikTok’s] dominance grows this will only draw further attention among regulators and competition authorities.”

He said that this market prevalence was unlikely to vanish anytime soon, with marketeers following eyeballs, which continue to have an increasing focus on shorter form content via TikTok.

Nonetheless, the GroupM estimate come after reports that TikTok cut its global revenue targets for 2022 by at least 20 per cent in September after it struggled to keep up momentum in the face of tightening advertising spend and wider macroeconomic instability.

Head of investment at interactive investor Victoria Scholar has previously said that although Facebook has been at odds with TikTok to nab the attention of Gen Z, the latter’s “overconfidence has led to a spending problem that has got out of control”.

Read more:
TikTok rides out wider advertising slowdown

Throwing different-sized content blades from a variety of release points is all well and good for day-to-day image maintenance, but even the best one-day story doesn’t elevate your profile to enough height with enough longevity unless it’s accompanied with a series of full-scale campaigns that are fully wrapped around it.

‘The Campaign’ evokes a sense of urgency, purpose and legitimacy for any image building, putting your persona on a particular trajectile.

It also glides through all the sometimes tangential, sporadic press opportunities you might have landed by joining up all the dots.

It also visibly draws in and namechecks many of your associates without the process looking in any way forced.

The right campaign disguises all of your mechanics. Like in a good film, you stop seeing the edits, you stop noticing the music, you just fall into the world you’re viewing.

The Campaign creates that immersive experience for your persona.

Jamie Oliver is a phenomenon in the world of food. He is well-known as one of the world’s best-loved television chefs and restaurateurs.

But Jamie isn’t just a Master chef, he’s also a Master image builder, deliberately using Campaigns that he leads consistently over his career to turbo boost his persona and ‘household name’ status.

He’s now launched a global campaign to tackle the child obesity epidemic through better food education in schools. To that end he wants to halve childhood obesity in the UK by 2030.

The campaign to do just that is entilted ‘Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution’. The Food Revolution is positioned as ‘beyond a campaign’, but instead a ‘movement’ to reach the goal of halving childhood obesity in the UK by 2030.

He’s doing this alongside the young activists at Bite Back 2030. This is a youth-led charity Jamie Oliver launched in 2019. With this charity vehicle he’s campaigning for a fairer food system so that ‘every child has access to decent, nutritious food, no matter where they live’.

In May this year, Oliver organised a protest outside Downing Street following then Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s obesity U-Turn. He got members of the public to turn up with desserts to rally against the government’s delay to ban the buy-one-get-one-free deals for unhealthy food products. He made one giant Eton mess for a photocall, as a way of taking a direct pot shot at Eton educated Boris Johnson.

In 2017, Jamie Oliver did a similar obesity-centric campaign called ‘Love Letter To London’ where he told Sadiq Khan to end junk food ads across Transport for London. As a result, London households bought 1,000 fewer calories from less healthy products every week.

Jamie’s School Dinners in 2015 gathered considerable momentum, gaining increasing public support, with Oliver approaching members of the government, to campaign for increased funding for ingredients and staff wages in school canteens.

In 2005, he opened a campaign, Feed Me Better, to introduce schoolchildren to healthier foods, which was later backed by the government. He was then became the owner of the restaurant chain, Jamie Oliver Restaurant Group, which opened its first restaurant, Jamie’s Italian, in Oxford in 2008. All helped with a social responsibility, campaigning message.

All of these campaigns have essentially been the rocket fuel for Jamie Oliver to be positioned as the saviour of the nation and remain that way for years and years.

Campaigns can be political, or philanthropic, or even environmental – drawing out all the other likeminded souls around a specific purpose.

When I used to do PR for Dame Vivienne Westwood’s Julian Assange campaigns and Fracking, it gave her the positioning of being ‘punk with purpose’ and made the clothes she sells mean more than just looking good. They jumped off the coat hanger with attitude and meaning.

Of course, some campaigns can elevate you so high you don’t ever come back down again. Bob Geldof, the Boomtown Rat and entrepreneur, got so defined by Live Aid, that despite all efforts, he’s now Mr. Charity and ‘Saint Bob’.

The Campaign is a total overrider from the standard blade-throwing process of content.

It stimulates and legitimises all the aspects of your persona.

Some campaigns can be long running, others can be short. Some personalities attach themselves to a multiude of campaigns.

When we take a look at four of the Top 10 advertising campaigns for brands worldwide, we can see
how simple yet powerful a campaign slogan can be.

Nike Just Do It. Launched in 1998 featuring amateur and professional athletes alike. An 80-year-old marathoner Walt Stack who runs 17 miles every morning was featured.

Attach yourself to that.

Its totally no nonsense and attitudinal to the core. But when launched it essentially manifested the idea into an active campaign.

Dove’s ‘Real Beauty’ campaign from 2004. Research showed only 2% of women considered themselves beautiful. Real women replaced models for the campaign. This formed real dramatic reality.

Coca Cola’s ‘Share a Coke’ campaign. They printed different people’s names across Coke bottles. Again, this used ‘real life’ to make people feel closer and more entwined with the brand.

Apple’s ‘Creativity Goes On’ campaign launched as a reaction to Lockdowns. Despite the restriction, creativity was flourishing. And now Apple is celebrating that.

This is not the same as the Single-minded proposition of the individual persona, but instead the slogan for a campaign which in these cases is for a brand. But equally they could be campaigns for ideas and thoughts.

Leading a campaign will always give you more brand building qualities that if you’re just part of the chorus line. Perhaps you lead one, and join in and support two or three others.

Read more:
Your persona achieves acceleration and lift off when you attach it to a Cause-related ‘Campaign’ – Jamie Oliver Is A Master At This

Phones4U Billionaire John Caudwell knows all about creating massive cut-through by throwing his content daggers at the media from well-positioned, multiple release points.

If it’s just you, or your PA, pitching yourself to a TV booker then that’s all well and good for a one-day story.

But it all becomes very predictable if the same person is pitching stories about the same personality over and over again.

Also, its impossible to cover enough bases.

These days just emailing out press releases into the abyss so often misses. The bespoke, handcrafted calling and leaving messages approach is vital.

Achieving a three-dimensional effect for your persona and real image magnitude like a large landscape painting in the sky, means utilising multiple release points.

You need plants everywhere to send in your daggers.

Eventually, with enough plants, you circle the cowboy with all the Indians positioned from down low and also up on high. Everyone appears to be talking about you.

For his personal PR, which of course mentions his John Caudwell personal brand all the way, he has hired Claire Powell from The CAN Group, who used to represent Katie Price and Peter Andre. So a proper celebrity agent/PR as opposed to a financial or corporate PR specialist.

But then for his just-released autobiography, Love, Pain and Money: The Making of a Billionaire, the press relations will be led by publicists at the publisher, Mirror Books, which is part of Reach Plc, who also own the Daily and Sunday Express, Daily Star and Daily Star Sunday and OK! Magazine. The press unit of Mirror Books would have constructed their own release about John Caudwell’s book and issued it to the media. Technically both The CAN Goup and the publicists at Mirror Books and Reach Plc could have both been pitching the media simultaneously.

There’s been situations where I have represented an individual business person, then the production company of a particular programme they have starred in has been pitching their own press release as well, then the publicist on the TV network the programme has been playing has also been at it.

You can have a rugby scrum of PRs working the same sort of content about one particular individual up into a frenzy.

Caudwell’s charity, Caudwell Children, which receives all the proceeds of the sale of his autobiography, will have it’s own communications team as well – totally separate to the book publisher, separate to The CAN Group. The common element here is of course the personal image of ‘John Caudwell’.

John Caudwell’s image collateral goes through the roof as more and more agencies handle their own communications but with ‘John Caudwell’ at the centre of it all.

When Caudwell owned Phones4U, well before he sold his majority stake for $2.8 Billion in 2011, and then unloaded the remaining 25% for a nifty $272 million, and arguably Phones4U’s competitors conspired to put it out of business, an entirely separate communications team would have handled the press releases but so often quoting John Caudwell.

As well as a PR entourage around your various business interests, there are plenty of other ‘agents’ that can be engaged to further disguise your mechanics.

Freelance journalists are vastly underestimated. They sit somewhat in a grey area between PR and journalism. Because they’re not fully ‘on staff’, they can be more persuaded to ‘come up with a story about you’ and pitch it to a national media outlet as if they have discovered a story.

News and picture agencies also create a perception of impartiality. If they write it up, they will put their story up on an approved news wire which is regarded way up the food chain in terms of its credibility rather than a bog standard press release which smacks of being from a vested interest.

But then you can open up a treasure trove of potential release points if you were to write an article for a Think Tank that has it’s own communications unit. Or a University Alumni with its own communications unit. Or a members club or association with its own communications unit. In these instances, your name might be part of a list of high profile business people, but regardless it’s getting your name out there and creating texture and depth to your persona.

The only thing binding everything together is the news index date which brings all the various communications strands together around an anniversary day, or report release date.

Everyone working on various communications can always slap the same Embargo date on their press releases. That way it aligns everything around a particular date so there are not loads of different campfires being lit.

Having said that there’s always ‘fire bursts’ going off randomly. Depending on the type of media outlet that runs, various media outlets can copycat the story that’s just run, writing their own variations of it.

One thing about the media, nothing is linear.

As long as a story has been reported in a particular media outlet, the same story can be presented as news up to 6 months late.

When Chase Vodka won the World’s Best Vodka award at the San Francisco World Spirits Competition in May 2010, I had BBC Breakfast go up to William Chases’ farm in Hereford right away, film as story and put the story on air. Then Fox News did the same three months later. CNN did it 3 months after Fox. All reported ‘Chase wins world’s best vodka’ like it was a breaking story.

Read more:
The assault on the media by throwing multiple daggers is best handled by orchestrating multiple release points – Phones4U Billionaire John Caudwell knows all about this

Elon Musk sought to assure Twitter advertisers that he is serious about the business and its culture before the completion of his $44 billion takeover.

In an open letter that encouraged them to keep using Twitter under his leadership he said that the platform was “important to the future of civilisation” and that he wanted it to be “the most respected advertising platform in the world”.

He said that was buying the company to “help humanity” and because he believed it was important to have a space where “a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner”.

There was a “great danger” that social media will “splinter into far right-wing and far left-wing echo chambers that generate more hate and divide our society”, he added.

The acquisition has raised some concerns over Musk’s support of “absolute free speech”, which could lead to him allowing previously suspended accounts, including that of former US president Donald Trump, back on to the platform. In his letter he attempted to allay such fears, insisting that Twitter “obviously cannot become a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences”.

He added: “In addition to adhering to the laws of the land, our platform must be warm and welcoming to all, where you can choose your desired experience according to your preferences, just as you can choose, for example, to see movies or play video games ranging from all ages to mature.”

In an indication that the takeover was imminent, the New York Stock Exchange’s website said that Twitter shares will be suspended from trading tomorrow.

Last night, the billionaire SpaceX and Tesla boss posted a video of himself entering Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters carrying a sink alongside the message “Entering Twitter HQ – let that sink in”. He has also updated his bio on the social media platform to “Chief Twit”.

According to reports, Musk told staff it was not true that he planned to cut back around 75 per cent of the firm’s 7,500-strong workforce.

Read more:
I’m buying Twitter to help humanity, says Elon Musk after completion of $44 billion takeover

When you’re throwing a multitude of blades from velvet sheaths at the media, you don’t want to be in any way predictable in your approach.

With on average 200 press releases arriving in inboxes each day, journalists are swimming in content.

Nothing really registers and gets any traction if it’s just the same old same old. A stack of similar size daggers thrown in the same way, at the same speed, all looking identical makes a content-worn journalist inevitably glaze over.

Daggers instead need to be thrown in with a variety of hand actions. Some thrown lightning fast. Others silent but violent.

The sizes can vary greatly as well in order to mix it up. In Mediaeval times the length of daggers ranged from 6 – 20 inches. Many were so long that they were often viewed as short swords. Your story content should be large and small as well.

And many of the daggers of old were very elaborately decorated and made from Gold, Ebony, Brass. Some even had diamonds encrusted on them.

Your story content needs to be the same. Some of the daggers arrive as a short emailed ‘tip off’. Others are a bunch of pictures and videos emailed over with just picture captions accompanying them. Others are 1,500-word feature-length stories where it’s written in the third-person and you’re written about alongside other experts as if you’re part of a feature. A bulk of your content are straight 500-700 word press releases labeled ‘Press release’ with a boilerplate at the bottom providing more information about a particular subject. A boilerplate is American PR slang for the boilerplate, or bumper of a car. The boilerplate is much like an abbreviated Wikipedia entry.

Sir James Dyson, the man, and Dyson, the business, are completely intertwined with this elaborate content-producing system to be fired at the media.

Dyson, the company, is well known for its innovative vacuum cleaners and ‘air-blade’ hand dryers. James Dyson as the founder is like the ‘Japeto’ that burns the midnight oil every night coming up it all.

What his team like him talking about in the media are a suite of set-piece stories around entrepreneurship, nostalgic memories of his upbringing, innovation awards winners that Dyson sponsor, new inventions from James himself, dividend payouts etc.

500-700 word news releases are self-written and produced around these repeating themes which have updates poured into the mould.
-Dyson Promises Power With $1500 Cordless Vacuum (Channel News)
-James Dyson is right to urge us back to the office (The Spectator)
-‘Sir James Dyson speaks about growing up in North Northfolk (North Norfolk News)
-West Country’s Sir James Dyson now second wealthiest in the UK (ITV Hub)
-Kiwi student inventions make Dyson’s shortlist for $59k prize. (Stuff.co.nz)
-Sir James Dyson’s UK business pays out £460m dividend.

When James Dyson did his big GQ Magazine interview in December 2021, the stylised photography and subject matter of the article is as rehearsed and regimented as the news stories. His headline for the article is selling the brand with ‘Sir James Dyson: Most focus groups are wrong’.

But the look, feel, shape of this carefully crafted content is ‘Lifestyle’ as opposed to ‘News’.

All of the imagery used by Dyson the man and Dyson the business will generally be shot and supplied by Dyson themselves – or they would only ever be permit photographers to be commissioned that have been screened first, and they would have approval rights on the images used in the magazine.

The press content is as carefully managed as the use of logos might be managed by marketing managers through the issuing of brand guidelines.

Dyson is ultra-protective of its reputation, particularly because the man James Dyson and the Dyson business are so synonymous. If James Dyson the man went down, so too could the Dyson business run into trouble.

To that end, James Dyson, the man, is currently suing Channel 4 for libel over a news report on the 10th of February 2022 that he personally was complicit in abuse and exploitation at his Malaysian factory, a former supplier for his firm.

This is the same Sir James Dyson that just got named second on this year’s Sunday Times Rich List worth £23 Bn.

His lawyers called the news report “remarkably defamatory” and that “The main theme of the broadcast is the difference between ‘Dyson’s image’ which his firm seeks to project and protect, and the reality of abuse and exploitation which Channel 4 discloses.”

Channel 4 allege, via interviews with former workers, that they “suffered abuse, inhuman work conditions, and in one case, even torture while they were helping make Dyson products”.

James Dyson had to act decisively on this with his own legal action because if he just left it, the rot can set in and eat away the reputation of the entire business like a cancer.

This is left field, and totally not in the script written by Dyson communications people, that want to paint him as a brilliant inventor and entrepreneur.

When you’re not reacting to a reputational crisis, there’s about 20-30 story ‘shells’’ that make up the various shapes and sizes of daggers that you can slot your content into to throw it in at the media. Variety is the spice of life.
All of these ‘varieties’ are utilised by the comms team at Dyson.

The more ‘oven warm’ your story content is the more readily the journalist will cook it and serve it. I often describe it like a Hello Fresh box where all the content ingredients you supply are separated, washed and ready to combine into an Easy-meal, cooked by the journalist.

Wrapped around each dagger – or cutting-edge story – like a message on a string, is a news date which indexes what ‘happening’ sits behind the story that is being thrown at the media.

This gives the story a raison d’etre, or reason for being.

An interesting, repurposed, recognisable yarn is all well and good, but if it doesn’t have embedded a ‘happening’ or news date, then its simply superfluous fluff rather than falling into the category of ‘in the public interest’.

Often a manufactured and controlled ‘supporting event’ can be created. I was promoting a low-cost security camera a few years ago in a flooded market. I sent an email to the Department for Education, asking if they would support a trial of the product in schools. Even though the product was totally unknown, they sent back an email stating that in principle they would indeed support the use of this device in schools that protected children. I certainly gave them a leading question.

This ‘supporting event’ – with the documental evidence or an email replied to – acts to further authenticate a story. So not only is the story interesting, you are now also providing evidence of something actually ‘happening’ such as a potential Department for Education trial.

Adjoin that with a news index date such as ‘World Safety Day’ which just happens to be the same day that you want the release to run, and you’ve created your own perfect storm.

Its a story. Its a happening. Its a relevant news index date. A Holy Trinity.
These three combine to make the dagger extra potent, almost creating a poision tip.

When the story strikes – with the extra components – it becomes so much more penetrative, seductive and deadly.

Read more:
Blades thrown at the media must be a wide variety of shapes, sizes and colours to penetrate the shields – James Dyson Is The Master Of This

All CEO’s, Founders or Chairmen that get the concept of using their image to promote their business interests get their comms people to regularly push themselves onto TV, onto radio, into newspapers and magazines so they essentially become the personification of the business.

Elon Musk, 51 years, is well adept at using a sharp blade when it comes to cutting into the media – via social or traditional media avenues.

It’s his constant throwing of daggers from velvet sheaths that has elevated his profile with earned media – which means media you don’t have to pay for in the form of ads or paid-editorial.

From arriving in North America with US$2,000 in his pocket at 17 years of age from his homeland of South Africa, the tech titan is now worth US$230 Billion courtesy of SpaceX, OpenAI, The Boring Company and Neuralink Inc and Tesla.

He arrived on the U.S. business and media scene in 1996 with his venture Zip2, which brought the internet to companies like the New York Times, Hearst and Knight-Ridder. Compaq acquired Zip2 in 1999 for US$340 million.

Rather than settling for standard stories about new hires or annual results that show growth, Musk has been fully engaged with content generation by sending daggers at targets creating a multitude of reportable ‘mini-deaths’ or stories for years.

As NDTV reported in May 2022 about Musk, ‘Elon Musk Gives Many Headlines In a 40-Minute Interview’.

Essentially, he is a living, breathing, walking, talking headline generating machine.

On Twitter, which he joined in June 2009, he now has 105 million followers.
Musk fires a daily diet of daggers, some missing the target, but many hitting and creating viral traction. All with a sharpened blade.

Apart from his hard-hitting, no-nonsense opinions that make great tweets and subsequently headlines, his pronouncements characteristically strike hard and ring alarm bells.

He’s the epitome of a disruptive entrepreneur – and in so being – is disruptive of narrative norms.

He unsettles and explodes common held beliefs and perceptions or the status quo, often playing devil’s advocate to get a reaction – and ‘get the buffalo on the run’.

Just a quick glance at some of Elon Musk’s headlines and tweets show the constant flurry of daggers flying about all over the place.

‘Elon Musk’s SpaceX delivers Russian, Native American women to station’ (Independent Oct 7, 2022).

‘Elon Musk claims ‘bot attack’ ruined his Ukraine-Russia war solution’ (Independent Oct 5, 2022)

‘War is the ultimate Supreme Court’ (Tweet on Oct 6, 2022)

‘This would be my daily life if I were a lawyer’ (Tweet on Sep 26, 2022)

‘Will Musk turn Twitter into a ‘supercharged engine of radicalisation’?’ (Independent Oct 6, 2022)

‘Elon Musk suggests making Taiwan a ‘special administrative zone’ similar to Hong Kong (The Guardian, Oct 8, 2022)

‘Elon Musk blames hatred of rich people for daughter’s estrangement’ (Business Insider, Oct 7, 2022)

‘Elon Musk is totally wrong about population collapse’ (Wired, Oct 6, 2022)

For media savvy companies who want more bang for their buck than just a results announcement they also focus attention around the CEO, like Tim Cook at Apple, Reed Hasting at Netflix or Marc Benioff at Salesforce to ‘star’ in columns, articles and broadcast appearances.

But other companies deliberately choose the entire C-suite of CFO’s, CMO’s even CTO’s to share the limelight with the CEO, Founder or Chairman.

The Board often prefer a pantheon of faces – rather than singular ‘Elon Musk’ so that no one person becomes too powerful in the organisation.

Imagine if a high profile CEO, without any shares in the company, becomes synonymous with the company, but then is tempted away with a better financial offer made by a rival – or worse still, is suddenly hit by a bus.

The simple technique for business personalities penetrating either social or traditional media – is firing largely pre-created and scheduled content via a plethora of daggers, which are stored in velvet sheaths.

A good 85-90% of the content you release can be planned this way, leaving 15% for on-the-day-spontaneity.

A dagger with a sheath covered in green velvet was first spotted in India around 1850, and has cropped up in English Literature as description for what women should aspire to be like.

Just like there are rules for engagement in war, so is there an etiquette in the process of disguising your media dagger in a velvet sheath, only for the poison tip, when thrown at a media target, to be particularly deadly.

The business personalities that get the most media traction, seriously punching, or in this case – cutting – above their weight, are the ones unafraid to use a sharpened instrument, and all of the time, although it’s deadliness is always well hidden by the velvet sheath.

Following are all the types of ‘cutting edge storylines’ and news-linked, opinionated comment that various CEO’s have been prepared to engage in on The Ian King Show on Sky News over the last year.

Strong predictions, statements, revelations and conjecture.

Ivan Menezes, CEO of Diageo – ‘Diageo boss warns of Scottish water shortage’

Mike Regnier, CEO, Santander UK – ‘Young people are in debt after not getting enough education about finances’

Ben van Beurden, CEO, Shell – ‘Governments may need to tax energy firms to help the poor’

Hiroshi Mikitani, Chairman & CEO, Rakuten – ‘Rakuten CEO Mikitani to donate 1 billion yen to Ukraine’

Severin Schwan, CEO, Roche – ‘Roche admits to losing money in Russia’

Dolf van den Brink, CEO, Heineken – ‘Heineken chief warns cost inflation is ‘off the charts’’

Peter Simpson, CEO Anglian Water – ‘Make more effort to reach net zero goals, Anglian Water CEO tell Truss’

Octavio Marenzi, CEO, Opimas – ‘Hold cash, sit on your hands, and wait for central banks to pivot before you reinvest’

Alastair Douglas, CEO of Totally Money –‘Brits blowing £17m a month on credit card cash fees’

Nigel Pocklington, CEO, Good Energy –‘Fifteen years of anaemic growth cannot be repeated’

Mark Tanzer, CEO, ABTA – ‘Scrap Covid tests for most travellers’

Mike Fairman, CEO of Checkatrade –‘Top DIY jobs homeowners use to transform their houses without paying up big revealed’

Michael Ward, CEO, Harrods – ‘Threat to London’s Cultural Status’

Raj Krishnamurthy, CEO, Freespace – ‘In a hybrid world, office downsizings are coming’

Martin Daum, CEO, Daimler Trucks –‘German bureaucracy preventing reduced gas use’

Sebastian Siemiatkowski, Co-Founder and CEO Klarna – ‘No short term solutions to inflation’

Victor Lugger – Chief Executive, The Big Mamma Restaurants – ‘Companies that pivot are best placed to prosper’

Graham Clemett, CEO, Workspace Group – ‘London’s SME’s are leading the way back to the office’

Fani Titi, CEO, Investec – ‘Investec CEO urges government to take more courageous decisions’

Chuck Robbins, CEO, Cisco – ‘When we make changes, we make them together’

Anders Danielsson, CEO, Skanska – ‘We probably have the best balance sheet in the industry’.

George Dymond, CEO, Planet Organic – ‘Can Planet Organic beat the cost-of-living squeeze?’

Aaron Skonnard, Co-Founder and CEO, Pluralsight – ‘Why companies must transform from consumers of talent to creators of talent’

Brian Gilvary, Chairman, INEOS Energy – ‘Would we be investing in wind or solar right now? The answer is no’.

All of these CEO’s stand themselves in good stead to get repeatable media coverage, because they’re prepared to stick their neck out and fire daggers at targets.

Like the magicians of old who threw daggers as part of their magic act, you now need to prepare a stream of blades to be thrown, all deadly daggers with poison tips – all with the sole goal of creating a constant series of ‘mini deaths’ or newsworthy happenings.

Stories, or mini-deaths or collisions, always follow a rule system of being delivered with eloquence, often a bit of alliteration and rhythm and what journalists so often call “pithiness”, in terms of the way they gently jack-hammer points across in a silky, calm-but-frenetic, somewhat wild-but-poetic way.

Ten years ago the content approach, whether in the form of press releases, or brief notes, or feature-length articles was known as ‘Associated Press-style’ or ‘AP-style’. Associated Press is a global news agency. This style is somewhat factual and informative whilst very professional.

But now, thanks to evermore rapid delivery of news via social media and the 24/7 news cycle, it’s more like a ‘Mail Online style’. A bit screamy. Drenched with facts. Almost a nail bomb, blasting the attention of the reader, who could so easily click off the story and onto something else. Heaven forbid!

Every story is chasing the rankings of ‘Most Read’ story and hopefully getting shared across social media platforms which demands a much edgier, full throttle approach.

Women’s magazines have operated like this for years, having a sort of ‘line up’ on a magazine shelf where every single front cover tries to jump off the shelf and into the shopping trolley in terms of the sheer alarm it generates, demanding to be purchased and consumed or the reader’s life is so almost definitely over.

Each of these story daggers – or arrows – are packed with poison.

All these daggers are aiming at the target, constantly being thrown, always looking for penetration.

Read more:
Multitude of daggers from velvet sheaths are thrown at media to build personal profile

A Match.com ad campaign featuring a woman performing subservient tasks for her partner such as making sure that football is on TV, and ensuring there are a fresh towel and socks ready for after his shower has been banned for being sexist.

The dating site ran a campaign on the video-sharing platform TikTok showing clips from a day in the life of a couple. The campaign opened with a voiceover of a woman explaining the tasks she does “that make him realise I’m a keeper”.

Other scenes show the woman preparing a protein shake and giving her partner a kiss while he relaxes with his feet up after a gym workout, making sure he has what he needs after using the bathroom and “putting the football on for him every evening”.

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), which introduced rules to reduce gender stereotyping three years ago, received a complaint that the campaign was sexist and perpetuated negative out-of-date gender roles.

Match.com, which ran the campaign with the strapline “Find your keeper”, said the ad used unscripted examples from real-world couples to “demonstrate that small gestures between couples were integral to successful relationships”.

The company also said the ad was part of a three-video series, which were launched at the same time, with one showing gestures carried out by a man for his female partner and the other showing small acts of kindness by both partners.

Still from TikTok that shows a woman standing and a man sitting down, with text that reads “I will make him his protein shake after the gym”

Match.com claimed overall the gestures were “not one-sided” and that although the woman was shown in a domestic setting the company did not believe that implied she did most of the household chores.

“For those reasons, [Match.com] believed that the ad did not portray that women must be subservient to men or that women should shoulder the burden of domestic chores,” Match.com said in a summary of its response to the ASA defending the ad, which it has removed from TikTok.

However, the company said that when seen in isolation the gestures made by the woman in the video that received the public complaint “could be deemed by some to be overly gender typical”.

The ASA, which introduced new rules around gender stereotyping to help stop “limiting how people see themselves and how others see them and the life decisions they take”, said that the ad created an impression of an “unequal relationship between the couple”.

“Because the ad relied on the stereotype of a woman carrying out domestic chores in order to please her male partner, we considered that viewers would interpret the ad as reinforcing a negative gender stereotype,” the ASA said.

The ASA also said the voiceover – which explained that she put the football on every evening and always has a towel and socks ready – “suggested that the gestures were habitual and undertaken by the woman regularly”.

The advertising watchdog said that connecting the woman doing domestic chores with becoming a “keeper” reinforced the idea that “women should be subservient to men in order to maintain a successful relationship”.

The ASA banned the ad ruling that it perpetuated negative gender stereotypes and was likely to cause harm and widespread offence.

Read more:
Match.com ad showing woman carrying out subservient tasks banned for being sexist

There are over 360 million registered domains out there, but when you’re choosing a domain name for your project, there are a lot of different concerns to factor in. As well as finding a domain that suits your brand, and speaks to the purpose of your site, you’ll need to think about how it could impact your SEO performance.

The good news is that buying a domain needn’t be expensive — with some providers offering them for under £1, or even for free alongside another product. That said, many companies opt to buy a domain that’s already owned, and this can get more expensive. SEO could well play a part in the decision to buy a pre-registered domain name, so let’s take a look at exactly how your domain name can impact your rankings in a SERP (search engine results page).

How does your domain name impact SEO?

While the exact number is hotly debated between SEO-enthusiasts, Google has confirmed around 200 different ranking factors, along with thousands of algorithm updates over the years, all of which directly affect how websites rank and perform on the search engine.

The list is constantly evolving, but (at the time of writing) domain names don’t feature. That said, they can still have a significant influence on your position for various keywords. Where a good domain name can improve your visibility and increase organic traffic, a poor one will do the opposite.

How do domain extensions affect SEO?

By contrast, the domain extension you choose has almost zero impact on your rankings. The exception to this rule is ccTLDs (country-code top-level domains). When you use a ccTLD like .uk or .fr, your site will likely have an advantage when it comes to geographical search. That means you’ll rank more highly in the SERP for users searching in the same country as your ccTLD.

Want to find out more about generic TLDs? Take a look at our blog to learn which type of domain extension is right for you.

SEO best practices for domain names

Thankfully, there are a few key principles you can keep in mind to make sure the domain name you land on isn’t detrimental to your SEO performance, and maximises your visibility on the SERP.

Keep it brief

It may sound obvious, but choosing a short, punchy domain name means you’re less likely to lose traffic to ‘processing fluency’. This term sounds like fancy jargon, but it effectively refers to the bias our brains experience when we’re processing something difficult. In short, if it’s tough to pronounce or write down, we’re less likely to remember or understand it.

A snappy, memorable domain name is more likely to be successfully shared by word of mouth. In fact, a recent study by Gaebler found that the top 50 most popular websites had an average domain length of just 6 characters. So don’t over complicate it.

Use keywords (sparingly)

Advice on using keywords in your domain name has fluctuated over the years, in line with a series of algorithm updates. Today, it’s not beneficial to stuff your domain with target keywords — and the spammy appearance of a domain like this can make potential customers question your legitimacy too.

Instead, you might want to consider adding an inconspicuous keyword to your domain name, maybe in conjunction with the name of your brand. One great example of this is B&Q, whose URL is simply www.diy.com. This domain name isn’t brand-specific, but it clearly indicates what the company does, and it’s bound to capture traffic via searches for terms related to ‘DIY’.

Avoid numbers or special characters

Search engines like Google can comprehend and index content containing hyphens, so they arguably have no bearing on how well your site performs. But you can’t deny that hyphens, numbers and other special characters inevitably complicate a domain name, so they’re likely to reduce readability and customer memorability as a result.

Choose the right extension

While domain extensions can’t directly boost your rankings, choosing a suspect or unusual extension could hamper your performance. And if you’re going with a generic TLD rather than a ccTLD, it’s worth noting that .com is the most popular domain extension on the market.

That said, there are plenty of other trustworthy domain extensions out there which could be more suited to your project’s identity, like .org for charities and non-profits, or .shop for ecommerce sites. These extensions clearly signify the purpose of your project to search engines like Google too. A creditable domain extension is just as important as the domain name itself, and it can make all the difference to your potential customers.

Consider defensive domain registration

One tactic you can employ to indirectly improve your site’s organic traffic is defensive domain registration. This is when you purchase domain names which are almost (but not quite) identical to yours, to stop typosquatters from making themselves at home and stealing your valuable site visits.

Instead, you can register domain typos and use these “defensive domains” to redirect traffic to your actual website, which — at least in theory — prevents you from losing customers.

Now you know how to choose an SEO-friendly domain

These tips should help you choose an SEO-friendly domain name that does your project justice, so you can get registered and start your build with a clear identity for your website. Don’t forget — it’s also well worth checking out what kind of domain names your biggest competitors are using, and where they’re ranking in the SERP. This can help you get a sense of how different domains are positioned and received in the market.

Read more:
How to choose an SEO-friendly domain name

The equal and opposite action of reacting to trending news and then coat tail riding the story of the day with your expert opinions – is the seeded or placed story. This is where you set your own news agenda in the form of a bespoke narrative.

News reaction through parasitic means and its opposite, News procreation, really do work together in harmony to steadily build and maintain media profile.

They go together like a hand in a glove. Or a hammer and anvil, the military technique involving the use of two primary forces, one to pin down an enemy, and the other to smash the opponent.

You certainly don’t want one without the other in terms of the long-term building of a robust profile.

You see a number of faces on ITV This Morning or GB News that appear as experts regularly whether it’s Medical or to do with the Construction Industry. But then that’s the only place you ever see or hear about them. They’re not outputting any of their own native content into the public domain whatsoever. Just take take take in the form of grabbing an existing story breaking in the news and having a strong opinion about it, on either side of the narrative divide.

Former Channel 4 Chairman and CEO of Risk Capital, Luke Johnson, is an example of someone who has got a healthy mix of news reaction and news procreation in terms of his public persona. With his regular ‘The Maverick’ columns over the years for the Sunday Telegraph, these all got turned into a book, The Maverick: Dispatches From An Unrepentant Capitalist. Now he’s in the Sunday Times with a weekly column, only paused briefly in 2019 when Patisserie Valerie, which he chaired, went down, to let the dust settle. His new book Start It Up: Why Running Your Own Business Is Easier Than You Think has put him back in the author stakes. Twitter acts as one big news reaction opportunity for Johnson, where he risks his own reputation for what he believes in with regards to his extremely strong views about the wiping out of our freedoms. On the back of this, bookers from news channels cherry-pick what he’s saying about Covid, Climate, our fundamental freedoms and the Economy and book him regularly to discuss his views on breaking stories.

Toby Young, head of the Free Speech Union, keeps working the two techniques. He’ll write books like How To Win Friends And Alienate People but also regularly stands up for Freedom of Expression rights of people right across the political spectrum and attacks trending stories in this space as an expert.

While parasiting is a ‘quick hit’, the procreation bit can often be a bit more involved, just like it is in real life!

No matter how well-intentioned and thought through your proactive grand announcement might be, backed up with tonnes of field research, the paid-for PR Newswire release to 100,000 or 1,000,000 contacts can so often go into a vacuum. Often with no rhyme or reason. It just misses completely. You send out your wonderful communication and the world seemingly falls into total silence.

Any journalist will tell you that press releases so often miss the fundamentals of narrative.

When they’re sent out, so often all the juice has been drained from them, in a diluted, bland form. A shadow of their former selves after edit after edit by a committee.

Journalists field between 300 and 1,000 press releases every day.

That’s an awful lot of well-thought-through releases wanting to fertilise a very finite number of eggs.

There is a very finite quota of stories pertaining to a particular Subject area in any media outlet including radio and television just like there is in a national newspaper.

This breaks down into National news subdivided up into Crime, Health, Environment, Consumer etc. Lifestyle which includes wellbeing, fashion and cooking. International news. Local news. Opinion. Features. Entertainment such as TV, cinema and travel. Business. Sport.

There’s only a quota of 2 or 3 stories in each of the categories that will ever see the light of day each day. The rest will fall by the wayside.

All the releases swimming like sperm have to not only prove to be the strongest, but also pass a full MOT test.

Is there evidence provided for the claims made in the story? If not, it makes the media outlet liable to be sued. Does the story fit a typical preordained story-genre that journalists are familiar with so they recognise it as a story in the first place?

But then ironically, does the outer edge of the story seemingly explode and shatter pre-held beliefs or norms?

The fresh, breaking story is generally the collision of two fundamental opposites – a hostile act – to create a new.

A newspaper is full of hundreds of these ‘mini deaths’.

The French call an orgasm la petite mort. This means “the brief loss or weakening of consciousness” but most importantly, “the sensation post orgasm as likened to a mini death”.

Stories that get across the line are essentially the collision of opposities, or ‘deaths’ which creates the new realisation.

Interestingly, if you take a look at a Thesaurus, the definitions of ‘Collision’ and ‘Creation’ are antonymous, having the opposite meaning. The Collision Noun means the forceful coming together of two things.

But importantly, it’s through the Collison or Destruction, that comes the new Creation.

But fundamentally, it needs the Collision first.

That is the whole basis of the news agenda, and how and why your proactive content can form a part of it.

The leveraging, placing or seeding of the story so often occurs with just one particular journalist ‘taking the punt’.

In the spirit of the news being a ‘mini death’ and hostile act, placement often requires a bit of force, persuasion and a ‘firm handshake’ which might sometimes turn into an arm wrestle – never a brawl!

Always be polite. Have a sense of humour. But also be firm.

You’re in the process of casting off hundreds of other me-too similar stories that all seem rather similar. But in your case you’re proving yours wins in the Survival of the Fittest Hunger Games.

The placement with a single journalist can then be followed up, when the story finally breaks in The Guardian, Daily Mail or Sunday Times, with a mass send out to a BCC or personalised Mail-merged list of thousands of journalists who might then pile in with their own versions of the same story – because now it has currency in the form of the story running somewhere else.

I’ve done this the other way round quite often as well. A general wire out of the story has gone out to a broad list of contacts first, but where seemingly no one is biting.

In actual fact, no one wanted to be first off the block and were simply waiting and watching who else would go first and break the news.

As soon as just one outlet ran the story, with a bit of manual prompting and pushing in by me, the entire global media was ablaze writing the same story.

This is what happened when, during the 40th anniversary year of the Sex Pistols single Anarchy in the UK being released, I said that the son of Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren, the late manager of the Sex Pistols, was going to burn his £5,000,000 punk memorabilia collection in protest about the way that the corporate world had appropriated punk. There was a Virgin Punk credit card. McDonalds had done punk McNuggets.

So this was widely released first. Single placement second.

Generally, its single placement first, then wider release second.

Read more:
PR advice: Seeding a story is equally important to news reaction

Social media has become the preferred method for marketers to reach customers during the past decade. The trend is not likely to change in the coming years.

According to new research companies will spend 19% more money per internet user on mobile social media in 2022. On average, companies will pay $36.37 per internet user to advertise on mobile social media in 2022.

Companies To Spend $36.37 Per User On Mobile Social Media

According to the data available on Statista.com, companies are expected to spend $226.01 billion on social media ads in 2022. Of this figure, 82% will be paid by companies on mobile social media, whereas the remaining 18% will account for desktop social media advertising.

Hence, most of the ad spending on social media is targeted toward the mobile platform. The global average ad spending per user on mobile social media has become more than three-fold during the 2017-2021 period. In 2017, the average ad spending per user was $10.11 for mobiles. By 2021, this figure had increased to $30.57, indicating a 202% increase in the space of four years.

Meanwhile, the spending on desktop advertising barely moved from $4.24 to $7.24 simultaneously.

Advertising spending on mobile social media has consistently increased since 2017 and mainly shot up during the pandemic years. The rate of increase in ad spend per user is expected to slow down in the coming years, but nevertheless, ad spending will continue to grow at a substantiate rate.

During the ongoing year, the average ad spending per user is expected to increase by 19% to $36.37. In 2023, the rate is expected to increase further by 14.3% to $41.56. By 2027, companies will spend $52.98 per user on mobile social media. In comparison, the spending on desktop advertising will be modest in the future. The average ad spending per user on desktop social media is expected to be $10.64 in 2027.

US Lead Ad Spending At $226 Per User

There is a stark contrast between ad spending in different countries. The United States market attracts the most money on mobile social media advertising. Marketers are expected to spend up to $226 per US customer on mobile social media in 2022.

In comparison, marketers are expected to spend only $125.7 per internet user in the United Kingdom and $64.41 per user in China.

Read more:
Ad spending on mobile social media to grow by 19% in 2022

The one-line single minded proposition is your ticket to drive on the media motorway.

Get it right and you get green lights all the way, and infact you can confidently accelerate, almost like you’re in a jet stream. Get it wrong and you can be stopped by every single red traffic light, traffic jammed for miles crawling along at a snail’s pace or remaining totally stationary altogether.

If the single-minded proposition is your tree anchored by the roots of your back story, all your content in the form of subsequent stories are the branches that stem from it.

It’s what William Chase, the founder of Tyrrells Crisps and Chase Vodka calls ‘The Magic’.

Literally, it’s like Ali-Baba And The Flying Magic Carpet. Get on and you effortlessly take off, seemingly without a care in the world, riding high across the Arabian night sky.

I first worked with William Chase ‘making the magic’ around the exit stage of Tyrrells crisps in 2008 which he sold for £40 million. This sale overlapped the early growth phase of Chase Vodka, which sold for an estimated £80 million to Diageo in 2021.

I came up with and deployed the narratives about Chase ‘selling vodka to the Russians’ around the time of the Football World Cup after Chase won the San Francisco World Spirits Competition for ‘world’s best vodka’ knocking P Diddy endorsed Ciroc rock off its perch.

Chase is now fully focused on his ‘third coming’, Willy’s Apple Cider Vinegar, getting people hooked on a daily dose of Willy’s to keep the doctor away and boost immunity. In this ‘virus world’, that’s certainly ‘of its time’.

He’s pondering how to best position and reignite his back story so it breathes life into Willy’s Apple Cider vinegar.

Chase’s personal story as a farming entrepreneur has always cross-fertilised first his potato crisps business followed by the potato vodka business – selling the provenance and craftsmanship of the brands.

William Chase positioned himself as an Everyman anti-hero. A fighter. An overcomer of obstacles.

But that’s only part of the single-minded positioning.

The other part, which creates ‘The Magic’, is the strap-on, change-out component, the ‘campaign’ that adjusts the single-minded proposition to the media market – the mood and temperature of the time, but more importantly, allows you to fill a position not already owned by someone else.

Get it right, and it means you can personify and fill a market gap and get lift off because there’s space for you to occupy.

So the single-minded proposition isn’t so single-minded after all – but instead a single-minded proposition, adjusted to the market at any given time through a ‘subplot’ or ‘campaign’.

Diet Coke is a brand with grounded, solidified somewhat static brand values. So the ‘Kate Moss for Diet Coke’ is the sub-plot or campaign which has a short life span and is changed out.

If your personal brand is Harrods, then the subplot or ‘campaigns’ are the ever-rotating dazzling window displays that create interest and maintain freshness.

So the two, the X and Y chromosome are one. The X is the anchor. The Y is the market adjustment and filler of a gap.

It can become a bit like a chess game played with a suck it and see attitude.
Market testing can take a while before something finally gels. The agar growing on the jelly.

William Chase found the gap in terms of his single minded-proposition but adjusted to the market mood, as the antithesis of the BBC Dragons’ Den multimillionaires all showing off about their wealth in documentaries with them jumping out of helicopters in Monte Carlo and magazine interviews showing off their car collections back in 2006 and 2007.

Chase was raw and real and quite literally ‘down to earth’ and ‘down on the farm’.

He cut to the chase, revealing how he had filed for bankruptcy at the age of 32 when he had problems harvesting the potato crops. He was happy to be this real and honest and gritty to anyone that would listen.

Rather than keeping his bankruptcy a guilty, hidden secret, Chase zeroed in on it as his subplot or ‘campaign’ and created a positioning – sharply in contrast with the multi-millionaire Dragons.

He wasn’t a ‘me too’ entrepreneur like the Channel 4 Secret Millionaires chasing the coat tails of the Dragons but positioned as the antidote to the gratuitous, showy-offy displays of personal wealth. Yes, James Caan had not one but two Rolls Royce Phantoms in his garage! Will Chase was happy on his tractor.

It worked.

His story truly took off and subsequently the food and drink sections of all the national newspapers followed suit by filling their pages with product PR for Chase Distillery and the features sections with personal profiles on William Chase, the hardworking Hereford farmer.

When you get it right, rather than simply putting out, you get a lot of requests back the other way from journalists trying to keep up. It all starts to build like stoking a roaring fire in winter.

In the same way The Rolling Stones were the antidote to the clean-cut Beatles, Chase was the antidote to the multimillionaire BBC Dragons.

Hertz got famous with the slogan. ‘We’re only Number 2, but we try harder’. They fully accepted that Avis were number 1, admitted it, and then found the gap with their ‘service with a smile’, showing they try harder. That penetrated the media curtain. That positioned them for take-off.

The famous 2011 book of inspiration by M&C Saatchi is called ‘The Brutal Simplicity of Truth: How It Changed The World’.

One particular story in there sums up the importance of positioning in terms of making things fly for either products or people.

It says:

‘Every day, a blind man sat on the pavement in Central Park. He had his hat in front of him, begging for money. The sign read:

I am blind

Passers-by ignored him.

One day, an advertising man saw his plight. He altered the wording on his sign and the cash started pouring into the hat. What had he done?

He had changed the sign to read:

‘It is Spring and I am blind’.

Your personal brand is much the same. Just being blind is only one aspect.

The missing component is market adjustment and qualifier. In this case ‘it being Spring’ was the vital component for the blind man to get traction with his audience.

Each subplot, campaign or ‘cartridge’ has a lifespan and then needs to be swapped out at some point once it’s run its course.

Chase can’t create ‘The Magic’ for Willy’s Apple Cider Vinegar by telling the bankruptcy story all over again. It’s been done to death. That subplot in terms of his positioning is over.

Meghan Markle is currently struggling for relevance in the USA as she tries to recycle her victim status at the hands of the ‘nasty racist royals’.

People aren’t wearing it. Not because she’s not presenting it in a believable, emotion-fuelled way, but because she’s exhausted the positioning of being a victim at the hands of the Royal family. It’s run its course and she’s done it to death. She needs something new like the US Presidency to set her sights on.

The change-out subplots can be rapid-burn or slow-burn depending on market forces.

For Las Vegas based Entrepreneur Krista Waddell I had a truly golden period when she brought to Britain Ounces2Pounds at the onset of the financial crash of 2007-2008. Reverse tupperware-style parties were ‘of their time’. They had started in Canada and the USA. Krista was the first to bring them to Britain. I had Krista interviewed on BBC business shows as an innovator. Loads of Me too copycats launched and started getting press traction eventually – generally as spin-offs from various pawn brokers. But Ounces2Pounds were in first, and maxed out the press. I had them on BBC Breakfast, CNN, The Sun, The Telegraph you name it. Krista eventully melted down £2 million worth of junk jewellery made up of single cufflinks and single gold earrings in Birmingham before leaving the country again. The financial crash was her ‘campaign’ which, bolted on, created her positioning.

You’ll know when its time to develop and deploy something new as your bounce seems to be becoming a little flat.

Madonna has had more media lives than I’ve had hot dinners because she has expertly repositioned her personal brand time and time again with ‘Great resets’ while never removing or eroding the essence of what makes her tick.

The two-pronged ‘single-minded proposition is the key to unlocking the door of media coverage gold. Once you get this right you can proliferate your content and start to push it out into the media marketplace.

Read more:
The single-minded proposition for your media persona isn’t as single minded as you think

Consumers see thousands of marketing messages and adverts every single day. For businesses and marketers this poses a difficult problem, how can they reach their audience when they’re audience is bombarded with so many messages?

Not only do business owners have to fight for their audience’s attention, but this extra competition also drives the cost of advertising through the roof making it unfeasible for many small businesses.

Larger companies, have another problem. They struggle to have real conversations with their audience, instead adopting the old-style of marketing– talking ‘at’ their audience rather than ‘to’ them.

How personalised marketing can help

Personalised marketing is exactly how it sounds, it’s about speaking to an audience in a way that they prefer. They receive messages and information based on their preferences and needs, as opposed to bombarding them with broad advertising messages that they’re most likely ignoring.

Personalised marketing also allows companies to speak to customers more closely and gain an understanding of them, their goals, problems and concerns. This also allows business owners to offer specific solutions that will help their audience achieve their goals in a way that suits them. There are a few ways you can get started with personalised marketing.

Collect the correct data first

One of the best ways to find out what customers want and need is to ask them. It sounds simple enough, but businesses often miss this step. Instead, they opt for creating products and services that their customers don’t want and they fail to sell them.

Use a quiz or a survey tool

Businesses can make a quiz or a survey that customers can take before buying. This quiz will allow customers to answer questions before a company makes a recommendation. The best part, it’s automated. This is a highly effective way to deliver personalised messaging without customers needing to speak to anyone. Businesses can collect information and contact details from their potential customers whilst also delivering relevant products. It’s win-win.

One major benefit for business owners is that this method of automation allows them to collect new and interested leads 24 hours a day.

Personlised recommendations

Once someone has completed a quiz or survey, they can be redirected to a page that only offers products and services that are right for them. This method of data-driven recommendations makes customers feel more valued and allows them to save time when shopping online.

Email communication

If customers decide not to buy immediately after taking a quiz, a company can continue to send email communication that is hyper relevant. The data from the quiz or survey allows companies to send personalised messaging about products and services that they know customers want.

Retargetting

Social media platforms such as Facebook and LinkedIn allow businesses to advertise directly to people on their email lists. This means the same people who have taken the quiz but have not purchased can then be segmented and retargetted on social media. This makes the adverts more personalised which is proven to increase conversions.

Use the data for good

If business owners are looking to create more products and services in the future, the data from the quiz will be extremely valuable. The data shows a list of wants and needs which will help companies prioritise which products to focus on first.

Businesses will always be looking for new ways to grow their audience and increase revenue. But by using quiz software alongside personalised marketing, companies can dramatically increase their customer relationships for years to come.

Read more:
Is personalised marketing the key to business growth?

Athletics icon Usain Bolt has moved to trademark a logo showing his signature victory celebration pose.

The retired Jamaican sprinter submitted an application in the US last week.

He is known globally for the move – in which he leans back and gestures to the sky – as he routinely struck the pose after winning gold medals and setting world records.

Mr Bolt still holds the world records for the 100m and 200m, making him the fastest man in history.

According to the US Patent and Trademark Office, Mr Bolt filed his application for the trademark on 17 August.

It depicts “The silhouette of a man in a distinctive pose, with one arm bent and pointing to the head, and the other arm raised and pointing upward”.

He intends to use the image on items including clothing, jewellery and shoes, as well as restaurants and sports bars, the filing shows.

“Given that Bolt is now retired from racing, it makes sense that he would look to expand his business empire,” Josh Gerben, a Washington DC-based trademark lawyer, told the BBC.

“The silhouette of his victory pose is recognised around the world. This trademark registration would enable him to offer the items listed in the application himself, or license the right to use the trademark to third parties,” Mr Gerben said.

Mr Bolt applied to register a similar trademark 12 years ago, but this has since lapsed under US law.

The eight-time Olympic gold medallist retired from athletics at the 2017 World Championships in London.

He could only manage bronze in his penultimate race – the men’s 100m – before pulling up injured just as he began to hit top speed at his final event, the 4x100m relay.

When asked if he would consider a return to racing, he replied: “I’ve seen too many people retire and come back just to make it worse or to shame themselves. I won’t be one of those people.”

Read more:
Usain Bolt moves to trademark signature victory pose

If you don’t intimately understand your major ‘doing self’ along with minor ‘doing selves’ you can come across like marbles scattered across the floor

One of the true experts in harnessing personal image for business success is former BBC Dragon James Caan CBE. A sharp-suited, no nonsense operator.

I spent 7 years representing his PR and worked with Caan again recently on one of his projects.

There’s a clear dividing line right at the summit of Caan’s media persona, which he instinctively knows how to curate and deliver.

He has Hamilton Bradshaw, the private equity and investment company as a corporate brand – which he is the CEO of. That’s one side of the dividing line.

But then he also has The Office of James Caan CBE staffed up and totally separate. And its this division that handles appearances, endorsements, and speaking engagements.

He injects his personal profile across a plethora of businesses – not just Hamilton Bradshaw at the very top, but a whole host of investments.

Below is the short biography and description of James Caan published on the website of The World Economic Forum:

‘James Caan is a Serial Entrepreneur. He is CEO of Hamilton Bradshaw Group, a private equity firm that focuses on buyouts and development capital and special situations, including turnarounds. He is CEO of ‘Recruitment Entrepreneur’ a seed capital investment company, and Investor at Spacious’.

Arguably the ‘James Caan CBE’ personal brand is the ultimate definition of the serial entrepreneur having stakeholdings in everything from dog treadmill, Fit Fur Life, on Dragon’s Den through to recruitment companies.
But you can’t get anywhere in the media jungle by simply taking a ‘scattered marbles across the floor’ approach with 100 different companies who you somehow personify and endorse.

It’s not a dog treadmill, but would be a dog’s dinner.

What is Caan ultimately known for doing? What does he actually do, in simple speak?

You must adopt the academic structure of an American University, in fleshing out your ‘doing selves’.

In these universities, students Major in one particular subject.

You must do this no matter how much you hate being ‘pinned down’ or ‘restricted’ and ‘defined’.

Then you can have a myriad of Minor subjects. Lots of other subjects can make up your portfolio.

Caan instinctively subdivides all of his interests into hubs and applies communications emphasis and weighting to the different areas.

At the top he’s the ‘People’s Dragon’ and TV Entrepreneur, forever defined by the status his BBC Dragons’ Den stint between 2007 and 2010. ‘The Chairman of the Board’ is his catch-all persona. His publicity pictures are often shot at a Board room table with him looking like he’s approachable but seriously means business.

When I organised for Caan’s electronic book rights to be given to Reach Plc to offer them as a giveaway to their readers in November 2020, the value from James was millions for their readers who love him as ‘The People’s Dragon’. He did a Facebook interview with Fleet Street Fox for the Mirror. But all the Reach Plc national newspapers ran the promotion from the Daily Record, the Daily Star to the Daily Express. All the Reach Plc regionals from the Birmingham Post, to the Manchester Evening News also ran the promotion, some on their front page. The joint reach of Reach Plc is 45,000,000 eye balls. This is very hearts and minds sell and was linked to Caan helping people out during the crisis of Lockdown with Caan positioned as the ‘People’s Dragon’.

I helped drive and define his role as the Chairman of the UK Government’s Start Up Loans scheme in May 2012 when David Cameron appointed him to the role. Again this tapped into him being ‘The People’s Dragon’.

It’s a very ‘catch-all’ ‘emotional’ sell.

This might represent roughly 50% of Caan’s communications output.

Its interesting how many high-profile personalities aspire to the definition of being seen first and foremost as a serial entrepreneur – but ultiomately they can’t.

Rapper Kanye West is very much defined as a rapper first and entrepreneur second. His business Yeezy, was valued at US$3 Billion by Bank of America in 2019. Infact the bulk of his US$1.8 Billion fortune comes from this sneaker brand. Yet, nonetheless, Kanye West is still defined as first and foremost, a rapper.

TV mogul Simon Cowell is not just a TV boss, which is his Major but also commonly listed as an entrepreneur. JK Rowling is also considered an entrepreneur by many entrepreneurial Top 10 or Top 50 lists. But people would clearly describe her as first and foremost an author. That’s her Major.
Its decision time, in terms of your bold approach at glory.

What are you going to Major in?

Is ‘Serial entrepreneur’ becoming the masthead of your boat to power forward into the oceans?

In terms of his suite of Minors, leaks break it right down in terms of James Caan.

Caan’s very much a Property entrepreneur, respected by property journalists specifically in this vertical. Property Week did a big feature on him when I represented Mailbox REIT. They know he’s got credibility in the property sector as he has a vast property portfolio and wanted to hear his views.

This might represent 10% of his communications output.

But he’s particularly big on being ‘The Recruitment Entrepreneur’ also. So much so he’s even created sub-brand called ‘The Recruitment Entrepeneneur’, to harness and power forward his image into at least 30 different recruitment agencies which he has a financial interest in.

He’s well respected by recruitment sector journalists.

He’s got to be careful the tail doesn’t wag the dog in this recruitment sector vertical because of the sheer enormous back story he has in this having founded both Alexander Mann and Humana International, today with joint turnovers of over US$1 Billion between them.

It would be particularly easy for Caan to become ‘lead’ by Recruitment.

Certainly, lots of his media requests automatically come in for Caan to talk about workplace satisfaction, the Furlough scheme during Lockdown, the four-day working week. Journalists often see him as ‘Mr Recruitment’.

But that’s not what he wants to ultimately define him. So a careful balance has to be maintained.

This would represent up to 20% of his communications output.

The Asian ethic minorities champion is something I helped developed as a high profile Pakistani national living in Britain. He was Chairman of the British Muslim Association. He invested in a Sharia fund. He encourages young people from Asian backgrounds to excel in business.

This would be a 10% focus.
The Philanthropist is the fifth strand to his communications matrix. When the Pakistan Floods struck in 2010, it was natural for me to help James speak to Britons about digging deep financially for his home country which was in crisis. He flew with ITV to Pakistan. He paid to build the Abdul Kashid Khan Campus, via the James Caan Foundation, for 400 underprivileged young people in a rural village in Pakistan just outside Lahore.

For a time, he essentially became the Pakistani Bob Geldof as I had him across BBC Breakfast, Good Morning Britain and everywhere else calling out for Brits to help out in Pakistan’s hour of need.

I also steered him towards becoming Chairman of The Big Issue for a time, the magazine which helps the homeless, which underlined his Philanthropic credentials well and truly.

This philanthropic aspect would be about 10% of his focus and communications output.

So, that’s 1 Major and 4 Minors that make up James Caan’s communications mix.

The sixth hub is less glamorous and one that is not emphasised whatsoever, although interestingly, it was picked up on by the World Economic Forum in them touching on him as specialising in ‘turnarounds’.

That’s essentially the acquisition of distressed assets. Caan often invests in companies that have gone bust and literally phoenixes them from the ashes. But this is not so glamorous and therefore Caan has consciously chosen to not focus on this aspect of his business dealings in the media whatsoever.

So the weighting here is 0%.

With this all worked out, you then need to weigh it all up in terms of the emphasis you place on them in terms of the quantity of content you create around each of the ‘themes’ and the effort you place on getting traction in the media against each of them.

Once you’ve defined what you, be careful not to step outside the grid.

One of the biggest blowups I’ve ever seen in my time as PR was the time in 2010 that I happened to be representing, for a time, the PR for both former Dragons’ Den star Duncan Bannatyne and James Caan simultaneously, but handled very separately.

The competitiveness amongst the Dragons’ was very fierce, and even though Bannatyne was ok with it on the surface, the fact Caan hired his PR, Richard Hillgrove, probably didn’t go down too well.

Bannatyne finally had a meltdown when Caan ‘got totally on Bannatyne’s turf’, from Bannatyne’s perspective, in terms of him owning the health club space.

Caan acquired Nuyuu, a health club, which he sold to Energie group in 2010.

Banntyne’s main business was and still is Bannatyne Fitness.

This off-brand ‘hostile act’ by Caan was enough for Bannatyne to refuse to talk to Caan ever again, quite literally, and he started sending dossiers to national newspapers to try to destroy Caan.

The last series of Dragons’ Den they were on together, Bannatyne refused to look at Caan or talk to him even once.

All their previous investments together – including ChocBox – were all thrown into chaos, as Bannatyne caused there to always be two separate Board meetings – one with Bannatyne present, and another one with Caan present. It got ridiculous.

Bannatyne took umbrage to Caan stepping off his verticals and into his health club space.

So define what you do and don’t deviate.

At all times, every aspect can be tweaked and updated as we gather more data and feedback.

Read more:
Precisely, What is the point of you? What do you do, exactly?

You might not be able to choose your family, but you can Pick n’ Mix the best media personalities to associate your image with – It’s who you hang out with that vitally defines who you are

As they say, ‘You are what you eat’, whether you devour caviar, lobster, kebabs, pies or cakes. Do you have large gargantuan meals or tiny portions on your plate? Are you all about rich or bland food? How about it being hot and spicy? All of this intake becomes you.

It’s not the 490,600 people who follow him you need to be concerned about. Who are the 711 people Theo Paphitis is currently following on Twitter, who also follow him back? Brand Theo is connected to Duncan Bannatyne, Peter Jones, Tej Lalvani, Kelly Hoppen CBE, Jacqueline Gold CBE the Executive chair of Ann Summers, Conservative politician Rory Stewart, Footballer Peter Crouch, Boris Johnson, Dominic Raab, Sir Tom Jones, Simon Jordan, Karen Millen OBE, Millwall Football Club, Lord Michael Dobbs, creator of the ‘House of Cards’ and June Sarpong OBE.

If it wasn’t who Theo follows on Twitter, who would Theo put on his invite list for the launch of his book, Enter The Dragon, by Theo Paphitis?

Brand Greta Thunberg has lots of interconnecting personalities that all intersect with it. These personalities are what her brand ultimately consumes. It’s like an interwoven busy Los Angeles Freeway with Greta as a traffic island at the very centre.

Analysis of Thunberg’s social media interconnections on Twitter and Instagram shows she’s connected to Michael Mann, ID Magazine, Arnold Schwarzenegger, IMG Models, Ravi Singh, Megan Domani, Maiko Haann, Johnoy Danao, Bullet Dumas, Narine Simonyan, Ali Abbas Zafar, Mehdi Hasan and Steve J. This is the patchwork of who Greta Thunberg is.

Proof of the pudding is in the eating, and these are the people that Greta has chosen to nibble on.

In terms of your persona, it’s very much made up, not in isolation, but who you associate with – both friends and enemies, what you read, the films you watch, the books you read, the walks and holidays you take, the clubs you join, the educational courses you complete.

In your image hill climb, you need to make conscious decisions about who you hang out with and what you spend your time immersed doing.

And to properly image climb you need to associate with, far less than the comfortable Z list in terms of influence. Instead, you need to go for the A list, which allows you to be dragged up.

As you go forward this builds and builds, ever-expanding, but always interconnected, with all joining lines leading back to you at the very epicentre.

With an atom, subatomic particles make each one up in the form of protons, neutrons and electrons. Critically there are a multitude of electrons, known as quarks.

This is where you get to have a smorgasbord of ‘friends on Facebook’ – or quarks – all forming an invisible hierarchy as they make up your atomic structure – or become part of your royal court.

Oliver Luckett and Michael Casey’s groundbreaking book, The Social Organism: A Radical Understanding of Social Media to Transform Your Business and Life, shows to an astonishing degree that social media influence mimics the rules and functions of biological life.  So embrace and work on your social DNA.

I argue its exactly the same DNA set-up with traditional media, you just can’t track it quite the same as on Facebook with notifications, likes and shares – instead only press cuttings.

Growth of your matrix of associations is much like Robin Hood collecting his band of Merry men on his travels. Little John, Friar Tuck, Will Scarlett, the Miller’s Son, Allan-a-Dale. Then of course there’s Maid Marion.

What ultimately made Robin, ‘Robin Hood’, was the inter-connected, expanding system of his band of Merry men and of course, Marion.

Make your proactive, conscious decisions on your associates wisely.

And be a good butcher constantly clearing the path so more positive associations can come through and connect with you at the very centre.

I remember coaching Duncan Bannatyne over a coffee outside at the Charlotte Street Hotel in 2006. It seemed trivial at the time, but it was a ‘Sliding Doors’ moment for Bannatyne at the time in terms of his growing influence on Prime Minister level.

Duncan announced to me over that coffee that he was going to publicly back then leader of the Opposition David Cameron.

I told him in no uncertain terms, “No you don’t support David Cameron, you’re supporting Gordon Brown, whose going to become the next Prime Minister”. Brown was still the Chancellor at the time before succeeding Tony Blair.

“Should I?” he said.

“Yes, that’s where you’re going to get the media traction – and credibility – because Brown’s on the rise”.

“Ok then,” he said.

In 2008, Duncan Bannatyne defended embattled Prime Minister Gordon Brown and dismissed the MPs who have called for his removal as “treacherous”.

In 2010, Duncan Bannatyne helped Gordon Brown unveil his ‘seaside manifesto’ being named by Brown as his ‘Seaside Czar’.

Bannatyne’s New Statesman interview in April 2010 laid it all out. “Gordon Brown is the best person to run the country, and I hope he stays in power,” he said.

In 2011, Bannatyne announced: ‘I’m supporting the Gordon Brown’s vision for growth’.

If you look at Sir Richard Branson, he works his associations at the very highest level. The King of Thailand, Queens, President Barack Obama. So, Branson chose his Democrat political affiliation carefully. But then his patchwork of associates is particularly eclectic. A visitor to his private Virgin Islands was Kate Winslett. So, its not just politicians and business celebrities, but Hollywood royalty as well.

I remember winging my way into the Sunday Times Business Christmas party with Duncan Bannatyne in 2006 at Claridges Hotel. Bannatyne was the only guest wearing a Hawaiian shirt and jeans with everyone else pretty much in suits.

I must have been the only PR in the room. This was a very exclusive business event. My former employer, Richard Desmond, then owner of the Daily Express, Daily Star and OK! Magazine, who I left for the world of PR in 2004, was there. He ducked and dived so he didn’t have to do small talk shielding me from coming over and chatting with Rupert and James Murdoch who he was there talking to. It was a wave from Desmond and then he turned away.

Days later I got an angry call out of the blue from him about his friend Sir Philip Green, who famously did all his own publicity, and I had been pitching to do his personal publicity referencing to my time working for Richard Desmond at Northern & Shell.

Green was keen to get someone who could place stories on him in the media so it wasn’t always him doing his own heavy lifting.

My wife had just recently cornered him at Swarovski Fashion Rocks in Monte Carlo in 2007 and explained I used to work for Desmond. The assumption was conveniently made that I was Desmond’s personal publicist as opposed to simply a ‘less relevant’ role.of being the Ad Controller for Regional and International.

So I got a dressing down on the phone.

When I bumped into Richard Desmond out for a walk in Hampstead one evening, I got the Sugar-style hairdryer treatment yet again. “Don’t f×£€ing use my name”!

I certainly made the most of my association with being a former employee of Northern & Shell and used not just Desmond’s name but also the galaxy of celebrities – business and otherwise – I interacted during my time there.

Like the time when David and Victoria Beckham wandered past my desk after hours, made some small talk, and slunk into Desmond’s office to sign a £1 million deal for the photo rights for an OK! Magazine exclusive.

At the Fashion Rocks event, my wife Lois reminded Victoria Beckham she’d met me, when introducing property magnate David Burke, who she was there at the event with and getting a group picture including Victoria Beckham. Victoria was very polite and obliging indeed.

Having worked at Northern & Shell was indeed currency in terms of making me hireable by all the Dragons and other business celebrities, it had real rub off.

The associations were worth their weight in gold.

The Dragons are a particular breed of business people who wanted access to celebrity culture not just the City of London – and the association with Desmond and my time at Northern & Shell was clearly a big part of it.

The hussle for associates can be the begging letter or the sheer implied association through the inclusion of various well-known names in all your press releases.

Drawing people to you is ultimately the best way around.

Growth is very much an even balance of both traditional and social media exposure working in parallel.

Remember, you can always fake it until you make it.

As Oscar Wilde says, ‘Life imitates art’.

If you create the benchmark, then eventually people will indeed play catch up and rise to your occasion.

The best planning method is reverse engineering. Take a high profile personality you respect, and then work backwards in terms of everyone that’s following them.

With social media pinpointing and logging everything its much easier than you think to become inspired by the address book of someone you wish to emulate and ultimately overtake one day like a James Dyson or Tim Martin from Wetherspoons.

Read more:
Why picking the best media personalities to associate your image with defines you

Building your persona and then later down the track your narrative structure first means stripping all the component parts of your image totally back to Ground Zero.

As Pablo Picasso would have demanded before he worked up The Old Guitarist in his Blue Period or The Boy With A Pipe from his Pink Rose Pink Period – a completely blank canvas.

First off the starting block has got to be a focus on your face. What does it automatically say to the world before you attach any Saint George and The Dragon heroic tale to it whatsoever?

Bill Gates knows his facial archetype as ‘The Super Nerd’ and expertly self-deprecates around it. The 1984 film Revenge Of The Nerds was a celebration of the nerd archetype. And of course the ‘The Nerd’ always tends to wear glasses. The flipside of Superman was Clark Kent, tipping his hat to Nerd-dom with the oversized glasses as his ‘disguise’.

Gates, like the nerd in the playground, always gets ‘tricks played on him’ and is misunderstood because he’s so off-the-Richter-scale bright, so much so, he’s almost ‘outer worldly’.

Gates hams up this nerd status when playing to the crowd.

In his recent damage control interviews around links to Epstein but also his modus operandi behind Covid vaccines and permanent pandemic prepardeness he geeks it up being a complete ‘open book’ about how so many people push and poke him.

“Me putting chips in arms, doesn’t make sense to me – why would I want to do that?” he told The Guardian.

Gates joked with the BBC in May, that “Only recently I’ve been out in public and some people yell at me that I’m tracking them.”

‘Yes I’m the most hated man in the world,’ he basically admits.  ‘People throw rocks at me’ is what he’s openly saying.

That’s what happens to ‘The Nerd’.

The Nerd doesn’t have any social skills around self. It tells everyone how misunderstood they are. The Nerd doesn’t hold back.

The upside is that, at the same time, the nerd facial archetype also embodies Super High IQ levels. So that’s where he gets all the ‘Despite my awkwardness, listen to me, I really do know what I’m talking about’.

That’s all in ‘The Nerd’ facial archetype.

My former client Mark Sait, the co-founder of SaveMoneyCutCarbon.com is a perfect example of understanding the facial archetype when promoting yourself in the media, in his instance as ‘The Super Nerd’ as well.

I convinced BBC Radio 4 MoneyBox to have him on to talk to their millions of listeners, got a full page in the Mail on Sunday to its 3,000,000 readers with Sait positioned as an ‘Eco Warrior’, I had him simulcast on both BBC News Channel and BBC World Business show reaching an accumulated 50,000,000 viewers discussing how the BBC could save money and cut carbon by installing more eco-friendly bulbs in their green room, full page Government-funded ‘How to guide’ style ads on how to safely return to work post Covid featuring Sait and his electric car, the list goes on – yes because the URL SaveMoneyCutCarbon was ‘of its time’ because of all the mad stampede towards Net-Zero, but largely because of the amplification of Mark Sait, the CEO’s, Bill Gates-esque ‘geek’ qualities.

I upped the ‘superintelligent’ nerd qualities of Sait, personally carrying the ‘Nerd’ message by Messenger-pigeon with his face.

Sait’s brother even works for Microsoft, I said!

To build SaveMoneyCutCarbon’s online widget that automatically links online sales of their sustainable products to an ESG score for company compliance, he hired Cornwall-based tech gurus, The Geeks. That says it all!

Let’s get down to the basics.

If your face was frozen, cropped just above the forehead and around the face, just so the forehead, eyes, nose mouth and chin were in view – what does that, without you uttering one single word – without anyone knowing your back story – or where you’ve been to University, what private members club (in Sait’s case, its the Home Grown club in London for entrepreneurs) you’re a member of – says about you?

Where does your frozen face then lie on a chart of frozen emotion?

My client, the former BBC Dragon James Caan CBE’s face resonates as a swathe ‘Omar Sharif’, much more so than his namesake, the late Hollywood legendary actor, James Caan. Omar is the Caan, the Dragons’ inherent facial archetype.

John Cleese wrote all about it in his 2001 book with Brian Bates called ‘The Human Face’.

“There are 6 Billion human faces and yet we instantly recognise faces that we don’t know,” he said. “How is it that this small part of us can be such an immediate and effective way to define who we are?”

And “How do we hide our true feelings when they are written on our faces without even knowing?”

Cleese expertly argues that there are just 7 universally recognised facial expressions: anger, fear, happiness, sadness, disgust, surprise and contempt.

But in between these are 7,000 discreet expressions.

In my opinion, these 7,000 ‘frozen facial emotions’ can all be laid out on a grid in the form of Emojis from sad/angry right across to happy/ecstatic.

Regardless of whether you’re sometimes angry, happy or sad, your normal ‘frozen face’ is automatically encoded with a dominant emotion – whether you’re feeling that emotion or not.

Like Sir Paul McCartney, he’s the deeply sad-eyed Beatle, whether he likes it or not as his dominant facial emotion. That’s whether he’s having a good or a bad day. He’s sad-eyed.

A&A is what I label the requirement at this stage. Acceptance and Amplification about your facial archetype.

Acceptance is about accepting you’re born with a particular facial archetype, but also only by acknowledging it can you unlock a galaxy of media opportunties.

This was the subject of my lecture a few years back to the Institute of Leadership Management. ‘Its your face. You’re stuck with it. Unless you alter it with cosmetic surgey, which I don’t recommend, you have to work with it. Accept that.’

So many entrepreneurs wanting to raise their profile try to position themselves as someone they’re not. They might want to be polo-necked wearing Steve Jobs as opposed to the geeky glasses wearing Bill Gates. But they can’t.

Recognising what’s already there and working with it is the key to unlocking the media treasure.

The second point is Amplification. Once you’ve worked out where your facial archetype sits on the Emoji chart, then you can amplify It, make it resonate. Like hitting a tuning fork.

You suddenly come into focus when the divining rod finds water underground with small movements suddenly becoming big movements.

Getting a handle on your inherent facial archetype is the doorway of the foyer of the mansion you just entered, opening up into the next room.

Read more:
To turbo boost your persona, you need to go back to ground zero: Your face is the starting point

When you first enter the business personality media jungle occupied by the likes of Lord Alan Sugar from The Apprentice or the panelists from The Dragons’ Den, you will probably feel a lot like a wide-eyed schoolchild on his or her first day at secondary school.

Your business might be starting to turn over a healthy amount, but meanwhile, you have another objective, cranking up the car of your media persona and venturing onto the open motorway, perhaps without a satnav and not much fuel.

At the very start when you enter the media playground, it can be rather daunting to say the least. There’s nowhere to turn. Nowhere to hide.

Like the line from the film Alien, ‘In space, no one can hear you scream’.

Read more:
Becoming king of the media jungle means starting at the bottom and working your way up by winning title fight after title fight

Amazon has bowed to pressure from the United Arab Emirates and restricted search results for LGBTQ+-related products such as books and rainbow-coloured flags on its website in the country.

The company decided to restrict the searches after being threatened with penalties by the UAE government, according to the New York Times which first reported the story.

The news comes as Pride month, designed to celebrate LGBTQ+ people around the world every year, comes to an end.

Homosexuality is illegal in the UAE, one of 69 countries in the world that have laws that criminalise being gay.

“As a company, we remain committed to diversity, equity and inclusion, and we believe that the rights of LGBTQ+ people must be protected,” an Amazon spokesperson told the BBC.

However, they added: “With Amazon stores around the world, we must also comply with the local laws and regulations of the countries in which we operate.”

Earlier this month, authorities in Saudi Arabia seized rainbow-coloured toys and children’s clothing, which they claimed encourage homosexuality, according to state TV Al Ekhbariya. It said commerce ministry officials removed a range of items from shops in the capital, Riyadh, including hats, skirts, T-shirts, hair clips and pencil cases.

Saudi Arabia has also banned films that depict, or even refer to, sexual minorities. In April, the kingdom said it had asked Disney to cut “LGBTQ references” from the Marvel film Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, but Disney refused.

Disney’s latest animation, Lightyear, which features a same-sex kiss, has also been banned in Saudi Arabia and more than a dozen other countries.

Read more:
Amazon bows to UAE pressure to restrict LGBTQ+ search results

Britain’s competition watchdog has launched an investigation into whether Google has broken the law by restricting competition in the advertising technology market.

The Competition and Markets Authority will assess whether the firm had distorted competition and made it more difficult for rival advertising services to compete.

The regulator said its investigation into the Alphabet-owned search giant would focus on advertising technology intermediation, also known as the ‘ad tech stack’.

This is a set of services which facilitate the sale of online advertising space between sellers and buyers, and is said to be worth £1.8billion a year based on 2019 data.

The CMA said Google has a strong position at various levels of this space – providing a wide range of services including platforms where advertisers can buy online advertising space; technology that automates the sale of advertising space; and those for managing ad inventories for publishers, which decide which ads to show.

The range of services offered by California-based Google means it deals with and charges fees to both ad sellers and buyers.

The CMA said it wanted to assess whether Google was distorting competition in the sector by limiting the interoperability of some services and contractually tying some of its services together – making it more difficult for others to compete.

The competition regulator said it also had concerns that Google may have used its platform to illegally favour its own ad services while taking steps to exclude those offered by others.

‘We’re worried that Google may be using its position in ad tech to favour its own services to the detriment of its rivals, of its customers and ultimately of consumers,’ CMA chief executive Andrea Coscelli said.

‘This would be bad for the millions of people who enjoy access to a wealth of free information online every day.

‘Weakening competition in this area could reduce the ad revenues of publishers, who may be forced to compromise the quality of their content to cut costs or put their content behind paywalls.

‘It may also be raising costs for advertisers which are passed on through higher prices for advertised goods and services.

‘It’s vital that we continue to scrutinise the behaviour of the tech firms which loom large over our lives and ensure the best outcomes for people and businesses throughout the UK.’

In response, a Google spokesman said: ‘Advertising tools from Google and many competitors help websites and apps fund their content, and help businesses of all sizes effectively reach their customers.

‘Google’s tools alone have supported an estimated £55billion in economic activity for over 700,000 businesses in the UK and when publishers choose to use our advertising services, they keep the majority of revenue.

‘We will continue to work with the CMA to answer their questions and share the details on how our systems work.’

There are also thousands of other players in the same market, including the likes of Amazon, Abode, Oracle, Microsoft, Facebook, Criteo, Trade Desk – many of whom have their own ad tech platforms.

The probe by the CMA, which is based in London’s Canary Wharf, follows its investigation into Google and Facebook owner Meta’s ‘Jedi Blue’ agreement earlier this year.

Governments around the world are strengthening the regulation of US tech giants that have become even more powerful during the pandemic. There are multiple investigations globally into their market positions, including in the US and the EU.

Britain imposed a new competition regime last year to prevent Google and Facebook using their dominance to push out smaller firms and disadvantage customers.

The move created a dedicated Digital Markets Unit within the CMA which could be given powers to suspend, block and reverse decisions made by technology firms and to impose financial penalties for non-compliance.

Companies were told they needed to be more transparent about how they used consumer data and that advertising practices needed to adapt to changing expectations around how data was collected and used.

Read more:
Watchdog launches probe into Google after claims it makes it more difficult for rivals to compete in advertising technology market

An advertising campaign for Tesco Mobile which used the names of foods as substitutes for expletives has been banned.

The newspaper ads, Twitter posts and outdoor posters used words like “shiitake” and “pistachio” instead of swear words.

The Advertising Standards Authority said they were likely to cause “serious and widespread offence”.

Tesco apologised and said it was trying to portray customer frustration.

One advert, a sponsored Twitter post seen in February, featured an animation with text saying: “What a load of shiitake”. An image of a mushroom covering the last three letters was seen to roll away.

A line underneath said that big mobile networks were raising customers’ bills.

Newspaper adverts criticised competitors’ price increases and said: “They’re taking the pistachio”.

And a digital outdoor poster showed an animation with the slogan: “For fettucine’s sake”. Three images of pasta covered all but the letter F in “fettucine” before rolling away to reveal the slogan in full.

The ASA said it had received 52 complaints that the ads were offensive because they alluded to swear words, with some people objecting that they were displayed in places where they could be seen by children.

The adverts used foodstuffs to suggest Tesco Mobile provides “supermarket value” for mobile phones
Tesco Mobile initially defended its advertising on the grounds that they had not used any offensive words or imagery.

But the ASA said the words they were alluding to were “so likely to offend that they should not generally be used or alluded to in advertising, regardless of whether they were used in a tongue-in-cheek manner”.

In the case of the fettucine ad, the ASA said the word “fettucine” was not closely linked to the expletive, but that when all but the first letter was concealed in the animation, readers would understand it as alluding to the swear word.

The advertising watchdog said it was likely that parents would want their children to avoid these expletives or obvious allusions to them, and ruled that the ads must not appear again.

A Tesco Mobile spokeswoman said: “We’re really sorry for any offence caused. We know the frustration that consumers face when they notice their mobile phone bill has gone up mid-contract and we were reflecting their frustration – and ours – in these ads.

“We’re proud to offer our mobile customers supermarket value, and so we used a play on words relating to food products.”

Read more:
Tesco Mobile advertising campaign offensive, watchdog rules

Elon Musk has said he will reverse Twitter’s ban on the former US president Donald Trump if the Tesla boss completes a takeover of the social media platform.

Twitter permanently banned Trump in January 2021, citing repeated violations of company rules and its judgment that his tweets were “highly likely to encourage and inspire people to replicate the criminal acts that took place at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021”, referring to the attack on the building by his supporters.

Musk, the world’s richest man because of his stake in the electric car company Tesla, revealed his initial stake in New York-listed Twitter on 4 April, and agreed to a $44bn (£36bn) deal on 25 April after several weeks of rapid negotiations.

“I would reverse the permanent ban,” Musk said on Tuesday, speaking via video link at a car industry conference organised by the Financial Times.

“I do think it was not correct to ban Donald Trump,” he said. “I think that was a mistake. It alienated the country and did not result in Donald Trump not having a voice.

“I think it was a morally bad decision and foolish in the extreme.”

The Twitter co-founder and former CEO, Jack Dorsey, echoed Musk in a Tuesday tweet, saying “generally permanent bans are a failure of ours and don’t work”.

Trump has stated publicly that he would not return to Twitter even if he were allowed to, preferring instead the Truth Social network founded under his name. However, Trump did not start posting on the struggling platform beyond an initial introductory message until May – nearly two and half months after its launch.

Many of Trump’s political opponents believe he would be unlikely to pass up the opportunity to broadcast to Twitter’s much larger audience.

A return would potentially give Trump a larger platform to influence the next US presidential election in 2024, either as a candidate or as a kingmaker among Republican candidates.

Musk also reiterated criticisms that Twitter’s staff are too leftwing, saying they were influenced by being headquartered in San Francisco, regarded as one of the most liberal cities in the US . Twitter is “coming out of an environment that is very far left”, he said.

“Twitter needs to be much more even-handed,” he said. “It’s currently left-biased.”

He also said the Twitter takeover would be completed in a “best-case scenario” only within the next two or three months. “It is for me not a done deal,” he said.

Read more:
Elon Musk pledges to overturn Twitter’s ban on Donald Trump

Elon Musk has said Twitter may charge a “slight” fee for commercial and government users, in the latest hint of the changes the world’s richest person could introduce after he completes his takeover of the social media platform.

“Twitter will always be free for casual users, but maybe a slight cost for commercial/government users,” Musk said in a tweet. In another tweet, he added: “Some revenue is better than none!”

Musk’s latest suggestion of changes to Twitter came as British MPs invited the multibillionaire to discuss his proposals for the platform “in more depth” before a parliamentary committee.

The Tesla chief executive has agreed to buy Twitter for $44bn (£35.2bn), in a deal funded by $21bn of his own money, a further $12.5bn borrowed against his shareholding in Tesla and the rest made up by loans from banks.

The estimated $1bn in interest costs attached to the funding have raised speculation that Musk will introduce charges on the platform and cut costs in order to make the transaction financially viable. The Wall Street Journal also reported on Tuesday that Musk could refloat Twitter – which listed on the New York Stock Exchange nine years ago – on the stock market in a few years once he has overhauled the company.

In a series of tweets referring to his ambitions for the platform in recent weeks, Musk has suggested a number of changes to Twitter, including making the algorithms, which curate what users see on the platform, “open source” – or transparent to developers and users. He has also pledged to defeat spambots, and “authenticate” all humans.

Last week it was reported that Musk had told banks he would develop new ways to monetise tweets and crack down on executive pay to slash costs at the social media platform.

Musk also told the banks he planned to develop features to grow business revenue, including new ways to make money out of tweets that contain important information or go viral, sources told Reuters.

At the annual Met Gala in New York on Monday, Musk said the reach of Twitter was only “niche” and he would want a much bigger percentage of the American population to be on it. Twitter has 229 million daily users worldwide.

In tweets that were subsequently deleted, Musk suggested changes to the platform’s premium subscription service, Twitter Blue, including slashing its price, banning advertising and giving an option to pay in the cryptocurrency dogecoin.

Meanwhile, the digital, culture, media and sport committee published a letter inviting Musk to discuss his plans for Twitter with MPs. The letter from its Conservative chair, Julian Knight, said Musk’s reference to authenticating accounts was of particular interest to the committee, which has called for a minimum standard for age-checking that also protects privacy.

Knight added: “I … wish to take this opportunity to invite you to speak before our committee and discuss your proposals in more depth. I know you have expressed your wish that critics remain on Twitter and this may present an opportunity to address any critiques in public.”

Read more:
Elon Musk considers ‘slight’ Twitter fee for commercial users

New findings have revealed that – for the second year running – brands are failing to meet consumer expectations between checkout and delivery, and generally still providing a subpar online shopping experience post-purchase.

This is despite the year prior, 2021, presenting some of the most challenging circumstances retailers have faced – with COVID supply chain issues and Brexit.

The study conducted by parcelLab – the global leader in Operations Experience Management – found that 79% of retailers fail to communicate after dispatch, creating a blackhole moment between order and delivery. parcelLab placed orders with the UK’s 200 leading e-commerce brands. The orders were then analysed based on their checkout, shipping and returns processes.

The report uncovered that once the customer made a purchase online, the overwhelming majority of retailers fail to keep their customers informed on the status of their order, instead relying on the carrier to communicate with the customer. In fact, just 10% of the UK’s top retailers communicated directly with their customer during shipping, with 11% of retailers communicating alongside the carrier.

Nearly four in five retailers either provided no communication at all or relied exclusively on the carrier to update their customer. It is widely acknowledged that post-purchase communications represent an opportunity that has typically high levels of engagement with customers – these emails often have open rates upwards of 80%, compared with the 20% usually seen with marketing contact.

While the majority of orders were delivered on time, 10% were still delayed. However, when delays did occur, brands were still unwilling to communicate this to their customers leaving them in the dark about the status of their order. 70% of the delayed orders did not inform the customer that there was a delay to their order, leaving them with no way of knowing what had happened to their parcel.

In a difficult trading environment, and with the logistical vortex of challenges retailers have recently faced, it is vital that brands put maximum effort into providing their customer with a first-class, memorable shopping experience. This report highlights the widespread shortcomings of retailers, and it remains clear retailers must do more to provide a memorable experience to encourage brand loyalty.

Katharine Biggs, Head of Marketing Communications – EMA at parcelLab, commented: “The state of Operations Experience Management report highlights the little progress that has been achieved among the UK’s leading e-commerce brands within the last year. We were surprised, amid the challenges faced by online retailers, that more has not been done to negate these issues and to manage consumer expectations through providing a transparent and efficient online shopping experience.

There is a huge opportunity for brands to leverage every touchpoint and maximise direct engagement with their customers. The brands that do this will differentiate themselves from the highly competitive market and will be remembered for it. E-commerce must react and place the customer at the heart of everything they do, providing timely, clear, and proactive communications to their customers.”

Read more:
UK’s brands fail to improve on post-purchase experience

The drinks company Innocent has had an advert banned by the Advertising Standards Authority after environmentalists reported it for claiming that drinking its smoothies is good for the environment.

In the television ad, a man and his otter companion find that their boat is hijacked by revellers celebrating chaotically as they approach a large waterfall. They sing about “messing up the planet” until they find themselves in peril, hanging off the edge of a cliff. They then row back to safety, clear up the rubbish, and start turning apples on a tree into Innocent smoothies, which they all drink as they “fix up the planet”.

The brand, which is known for its “wackaging” and is majority owned by Coca-Cola, has been making an effort to improve its climate credentials among consumers.

Complainants, including the activist group Plastics Rebellion, argued that the ad implied that drinking smoothies from a disposable plastic bottle was good for the environment.

In response, Innocent said it was a B Corp, which was a certification granted by the organisation B Lab to companies that demonstrated a high social and environmental performance. Innocent said it had committed to being carbon neutral by 2030, and had opened a carbon-neutral factory that ran on renewable energy and a cleaning system that reduced water usage by 75%.

It also said it was not trying to show that smoothies are good for the environment, and was instead making a call to action to its customers not to harm the planet.

The ASA ruled in favour of the complainants. It found that Innocent’s advert drew a strong association between the drinks and a positive impact on the environment.

The ruling states that “many consumers would interpret the overall presentation of the ad to mean that purchasing Innocent products was a choice which would have a positive environmental impact”. Officials said they wanted evidence that this claim was in fact correct, and they were not satisfied with the response.

The ASA said: “Although we acknowledged that Innocent were undertaking various actions which were aimed at reducing the environmental impact of their products, that did not demonstrate that their products had a net positive environmental impact over their full life cycles. We also noted that their drinks bottles included non-recycled plastic and that the extraction of raw materials and subsequent processing of those materials in order to produce the bottle would have a negative impact on the environment.”

Innocent is now not allowed to use the advert in its current form, or make claims about the supposed environmental merits of its products without proof for them.

A spokesperson for Plastics Rebellion said: “You can’t be a major contributor to a global health and environmental emergency and claim to fix up the planet. Innocent are being disingenuous about the dangers of plastic’s threat to human health and environment, as well as trivialising the horrific scale of the problem by repeating the mantra ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’. They’re guilty of brushing the plastic crisis under the carpet and trivialising it.”

A spokesperson for Innocent said: “We’re disappointed to see the ruling from the ASA. Our advert was always intended to highlight important global environmental issues and the need for collective action to make a change. We transparently share more about the work that we do on sustainability on our website. As with any new guidelines, we’d like to work with the ASA and other brands to understand how to align to them to continue the conversation on these important topics.”

Read more:
Innocent TV ad banned for claiming its drinks help environment

Google has announced that it will stop advertisers tracking users across apps on Android smartphones, following in the footsteps of Apple and causing a significant blow to Meta Platform’s advertising business.

The tech giant said it wanted to “raise the bar for user privacy” by changing the way marketers can collect data on users as they move betweens apps on phones that use Android, the mobile operating system owned by Google that works on more than three billion active devices.

Google said it plans to phase out advertising IDs, the special code assigned to each Android device that allows marketers to track details about users. It will instead look to alternatives that protect user data.

Currently these advertising IDs allow a company such as Meta, previously called Facebook, to follow a user as they move between different apps on their phone, gathering personal data about them, delivering them adverts and also seeing what they click on.

Meta has defended such practices, saying that users prefer seeing adverts relevant to them while allowing marketers to reach the right potential customers.

However, the move from Google comes after Apple introduced new privacy measures last year that allowed users to opt-out of being tracked by apps on their iPhones and iPads. The move rocked the digital advertising industry and helped lead to $300 billion being wiped off Meta’s market value. Meta has said the changes by Apple will cost it $10 billion this year in lost advertising revenue.

Google has said it will take a less “blunt” path than Apple and will keep supporting trackers for another two years at least, as well as working with app developers and the advertising industry to create alternatives. It added that it would give the industry substantial notice before it makes any changes.

Yet despite such assurances, the announcement from Google spooked Meta investors, with the social media company’s share price down by 2.38 per cent to $215.93 in New York today, as concern grows the changes could further eat into the company’s revenue.

Since June last year Android users have been able to opt out of sharing their IDs with advertisers, but Google now plans to ditch the feature entirely.

Such moves from Apple and Google look to upend how advertising on the internet works, but come as users grow increasingly wary about how their data is used and who collects personal information about them.

The announcement by Google is likely to provoke scrutiny from regulators on both sides of the Atlantic due to the huge power the tech company has in the digital advertising economy.

Google is the world’s biggest advertising company, owning the bulk of the tools advertisers use to reach potential customers and selling billions of dollars worth of advertising space on search results and YouTube videos.

The company has been under the spotlight for its plans to make privacy changes to its Chrome web browser, where it is working on getting rid of third-party cookies, which are bits of code that can be used to track people on the internet and send them targeted adverts.

Read more:
Google to stop advert tracking across apps on Android

A promotion by the fast-fashion retailer Boohoo that used “sexually suggestive” images of a model in an oversized T-shirt and thong-style bikini bottoms has been banned by the UK advertising watchdog for objectifying and sexualising women.

The online retailer used several images of the model, including a shot taken from the rear of her kneeling and another of her sitting with her legs apart, which prompted a complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) that the promotion was offensive, harmful and irresponsible.

Boohoo, which has previously been censured by the ASA for an email promotion headed “Send nudes”, said that the way it presented garments “reflected the diversity of women in society and their customer base”.

The watchdog said that while the advert was presented as part of the swimwear category, the actual advertised product was the T-shirt and the listing on the website appeared as a result of searches for T-shirts or tops.

The ASA said that in each case the staging of the shots was “sexually suggestive”, with the model shown with the T-shirt folded in ways to expose her body, instead of focusing on the product.

“We noted that neither the partial nudity nor the bikini bottoms were relevant to the product and that the images did not show the product as it would usually be worn,” the ASA said in its ruling. “For those reasons, we concluded that the ad objectified and sexualised women. It was therefore irresponsible and likely to cause serious offence.”

Boohoo said that it understood the importance of the issues raised by the ASA and removed the images from its website before the publication of the ruling.

“We told Boohoo to ensure that future ads were prepared with a sense of responsibility to consumers and society,” the ASA said.

In 2019, the ASA banned a Boohoo email promotion that used the phrase “Send nudes” in a message to customers marketing a range of clothes coloured to resemble skin.

It pictured a female model wearing a short, white dress and beige jacket with the words “Send nudes. Set the tone with new season hues” written across the image.

The ASA said the phrase “send nudes” was likely to be understood as referring to requests for sexual photos and said it was irresponsible to make light of a “potentially harmful social trend”.

Read more:
Boohoo forced to drop ‘sexually suggestive’ images by watchdog

The past two years have had a marked effect on how we interact with social media, with stay-at-home orders resulting in people spending longer online than ever before, whether it is to shop, socialise or just feel connected to the outside world.

Social media usage saw a global rise of 10.5% by July 2020 according to Datareportal, along with a sharp increase in active users across nearly every online platform between 2019 – 2021. TikTok saw the biggest jump at 38%, with Facebook and Instagram up by 19% and 16% respectively, as reported by Statista.

This has resulted in a rapid evolution of digital behaviours, and despite lockdown restrictions being eased across the world, these new online habits have endured, and are posing new challenges for brands that want to connect and build trust with their target audiences.

As Joseph Black, Co-Founder of UniTaskr explains Influencer marketing has become highly popular in recent years, with a 2021 report from InfluencerMarketingHub identifying 67% of brands already using Instagram for influencer marketing, and a colossal 90% believing it to be an effective form of marketing.

Why bigger isn’t always better

The pandemic has seen a shift in consumer priorities when it comes to how they interact with brands, so marketing messages must be personally relevant if they are to stand a chance of instilling trust. Influencer marketing does exactly this by leveraging the existing reputation of an established online personality, allowing companies to create trust and awareness in their brand.

Celebrity endorsements have seen a decline, with MarketingDive reporting 78% of younger consumers are simply not influenced by them. The role of these celebrity endorsements have become increasingly overtaken by online influencers on platforms such as Instagram and YouTube.

However, as these creators grow in size, with some possessing followings in the millions, they become increasingly disconnected from their audience, resulting in low rates of engagement and questionable ROIs for brands. Consumers, now more than ever, want to feel they have a personal, emotional connection with the creators they follow, and larger influencers are rarely able to offer this.

This might explain why nano-influencers, though possessing fewer followers, usually somewhere between 1000-5000, enjoy much higher levels of engagement with their audiences. They are able to cultivate closer, more meaningful relationships with their followers that simply would not be possible for a larger creator.

These smaller influencers can offer a dimension of authenticity and honesty that can effectivity build trust in a brand message. With Forbes reporting 84% of millennials state a distrust for traditional forms of advertising, and research from 99Firms finding 67% of Gen Z prefer to see real people over celebrities in branded content, nano-influencers offer a way for brands to effectivity engage these demographics.

Knowing your customer segments

While there has been a growing trend towards targeted marketing for several years, the pandemic has truly cemented this transition. It has reinforced the idea that for brands to be successful in their marketing efforts, they must communicate in local terms, in a way that chimes with their intended audience.

Gone are the days of the “one-size-fits-all” marketing message. Instead, nano-influencers offer a way for companies to tailor their message to specific segments of their target audience. Brands can target nano-influencers based on their location, interests, values along with a whole host of other aspects, to ensure they are not only reaching as much of their target audience as possible, but also connecting their brand to each of these niches in a meaningful and relatable way.

Nano-influencers possess this localised appeal, and in virtue of their smaller followings, are more able to place an emphasis on connection and community in a way that is immediately relatable and genuine. Though nano-influencers cover almost every conceivable niche and demographic a brand might wish to reach, the role of the student influencer has become a huge opportunity for those looking to extend their reach amongst Gen Z.

The student nano-influencer

Students are true digital natives, being social media savvy and comfortable within the digital spaces they create. Given that they are particularly interconnected and social, they have the ability to participate and engage with their communities, who in turn tend to see them as the perfect combination of influencer and friend.

This is particularly important for brands targeting Gen Z consumers, who place more importance on peer recommendations over other forms of marketing. A study from Digital Information World revealed that 52% of Gen Z trust the influencers they follow, while nearly 60% are more willing to engage with brands that have been endorsed by an influencer they like and trust.

Student nano-influencers already have the trust of their audiences, and fulfil that need for peer-to-peer recommendations while staying true to themselves and the niches they represent. They are a powerful marketing tool for brands, especially given the fact that Gen Z currently makes up 40% of global consumers and account for a huge $143 billion in spending power, according to statistics from McKinsey & Company.

A powerful marketing opportunity

While influencer marketing has been around for years in some form or another, it is a rapidly changing industry that offers incredible opportunities for forward thinking brands. Gen Z represent the next generation of consumers, and brands that establish early relationships with the nano-influencers that resonate the most with them are the ones who will stand the best chance of instilling trust and extending their reach far into the future.

Read more:
Why the pandemic has led to the rise of the nano-influencer

The UK competition watchdog has called for the power to fine social media influencers if they fail to tell followers when posts are paid for by advertisers.

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) told MPs it needed stronger tools to enforce consumer protection laws and deal with an “endemic marketwide problem”.

This month the advertising regulator named six social media celebrities, including Jodie Marsh (pictured) and five former Love Island contestants, for repeatedly failing to tell followers when they were paid to promote products in posts.

The CMA’s senior director for consumer protection, George Lusty, told the digital, culture, media and sport committee in the House of Commons that court action, which could result in fines, took too long and called for his organisation to have the power to issue fines to enforce its rulings.

“We think therefore there is a need for more powerful deterrents, and we really welcome what the ASA [Advertising Standards Authority] is doing, but ultimately we think that civil fines would be an important addition to the arsenal of regulators here,” he said.

The government is proposing to give the CMA the power to fine influencers for breaches of consumer protection law, under changes to competition and consumer policy that are currently under consultation. Deceptive or “hidden” advertising is illegal in the UK.

“The market has blossomed, the influencer marketing market has doubled in two years and it’s very, very effective,” Lusty told MPs. “It’s much more powerful than traditional advertising techniques and it’s particularly powerful with younger people in persuading them to buy things.”

However, Lusty said there was a low level of enforcement by the social media platforms themselves. “We’re still seeing across all platforms a very low level of sanctions actually being applied and practised against influencers.”

Last year Instagram, the photo and video sharing app, committed to a package of measures to crackdown on undeclared paid-for posts after an investigation by the CMA. This included Instagram vetting people’s posts if it appears that they have been paid to promote a business.

In 2019 the CMA said it had secured formal commitments from 16 celebrities, including Alexa Chung and Ellie Goulding, to state clearly if they have been paid or received any gifts or loans of products that they endorse.

The chief executive of the ASA, Guy Parker, told the hearing that the “scale and pace” of influencer advertising online and its “ephemeral” nature – some Instagram Story posts disappear after 24 hours, making them difficult to capture for monitoring purposes – contributed to difficulties with enforcement.

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Watchdog calls for fines for influencers who fail to declare sponsorship

Social media stars including Jodie Marsh and five ex-Love Islanders including Francesca Allen are to be subjected to a name and shame Instagram campaign by the UK’s advertising watchdog for continuing to flout social media marketing rules.

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), which issued a final warning to 122 UK-based Instagram influencers over repeatedly failing to tell followers when they were paid to promote products in posts, has resorted to using the social media platform to highlight their behaviour to users.

The ASA has created personalised ads that name the social influencers – Marsh, Allen, twins Jess and Eve Gale, Belle Hassan and Anna Vakili – stating that they have been sanctioned for not declaring paid posts to followers and pointing to a webpage listing all of those who “break these rules”.

On Tuesday, Love Island winner Amber Rose Gill was added to the ASA’s non-compliance webpage, although she is not part of the targeted Instagram ad campaign.

“For the minority of influencers that repeatedly fail to disclose their paid-for posts, it’s important their social media followers are told,” said Shahriar Coupal, director of advertising policy and practice at the ASA. “In a new front of enforcement activity, we’re using targeted ads to highlight the breaches of six social media personalities to the very same audience they are seeking to influence.”

The ASA, which is running the targeted campaign for an initial two weeks to assess whether the ads have an impact on the behaviour of the influencers, has not ruled out further potential sanctions.

“When we see the necessary changes to their disclosure practices, we’ll call off the ads,” said Coupal. “But, where non-compliance persists, we’ll look to more direct forms of enforcement.”

Social media influencers who continue to break the non-disclosure rules could be referred to Trading Standards or the Competition and Markets Authority, which has the ability to impose fines. The watchdog has also previously said it could also work with social media companies “to have their content removed”.

Under the UK advertising code, promotional posts must clearly indicate they are paid-for endorsements, typically using the hashtag #ad, short for advertising.

In 2019, the CMA secured formal commitments from 16 celebrities, including Alexa Chung and Ellie Goulding, to clearly state if they have been paid or receive any gifts when publishing posts on Instagram.

Read more:
Love Islanders to be named and shamed for not declaring paid-for posts

Fossil fuel companies and firms that work closely with them are among the biggest spenders on ads designed to look like Google search results, in what campaigners say is an example of “endemic greenwashing”.

The Guardian analysed ads served on Google search results for 78 climate-related terms, in collaboration with InfluenceMap, a thinktank that tracks the lobbying efforts of polluting industries.

The results show that over one in five ads seen in the study – more than 1,600 in total – were placed by companies with significant interests in fossil fuels.

Advertisers pay for their ads to appear on the search engine when a user queries certain terms. The ads are appealing to businesses because they are very similar in appearance to search results: more than half of users in a 2020 survey reported they could not tell the difference between a paid-for listing and a normal Google result.

ExxonMobil, Shell, Aramco, McKinsey, and Goldman Sachs were among the top-20 advertisers on the search terms, while a number of other fossil fuel producers and their financiers also placed ads.

Jake Carbone, senior data analyst at InfluenceMap, said: “Google is letting groups with a vested interest in the continued use of fossil fuels pay to influence the resources people receive when they are trying to educate themselves.

“The oil and gas sector has moved away from contesting the science of climate change and now instead seeks to influence public discussions about decarbonisation in its favour.”

Oil major Shell’s ads – 153 were counted in total – appeared on 86% of searches for “net zero”. Many promoted its pledge to become a net zero company by 2050 and align itself with a 1.5C warming target.

However, Shell’s net-zero strategy relies heavily on carbon capture and offsetting, according to a Carbon Brief analysis, which says: “Despite its ‘highly ambitious’ framing … Shell’s vision of a continued role for oil, gas and coal until the end of the century remains essentially the same.”

A spokesperson for Shell said: “Shell’s target is to become a net zero emissions energy business by 2050, in step with society. Our short, medium and long-term intensity and absolute targets are consistent with the more ambitious 1.5C goal of the Paris agreement.”

Goldman Sachs, which facilitated nearly $19bn of lending to the fossil fuel industry in 2020, had the third highest number of ads. The bank’s ads appeared on almost six in 10 searches for “renewable energy”, with many emphasising its “continued commitment to sustainable finance”.

Consulting firm McKinsey’s ads appeared on more than eight in 10 searches for “energy transition” and four in 10 searches for “climate hazards”. Its ads stated: “McKinsey works with clients on innovation & growth that advances sustainability.”

Alongside its work on sustainable investing, the company receives significant income from fossil fuel clients. In recent years McKinsey has advised 43 out of the world’s 100 most polluting companies, according to the New York Times.

A spokesperson for McKinsey pointed to an op-ed written by a managing partner at the company, which states: “There is no way to deliver emissions reductions without working with these industries to rapidly transition.”

Aramco, the state-owned Saudi oil company, which is the world’s largest oil exporter, had 114 ads on the keywords “carbon storage”, “carbon capture” and “energy transition”. A number of their ads claimed the company “promoted biodiversity” and “protected the planet”.

Melissa Aronczyk, an associate professor at Rutgers University, said: “Since at least the 1980s in the US, there has been a very concerted effort by public relations agents to help polluting companies develop strategies to ‘go green’ while maintaining business as usual.

“Many of the initiatives companies are taking are very piecemeal and will not amount to any kind of long-term or systemic change.”

Johnny White, a lawyer at environmental charity ClientEarth, called for stronger regulation of adverts placed by polluting industries. “Fossil fuel companies spend millions on incredibly sophisticated advertising campaigns, so sorting fact from fiction can be really tricky for the public.

“Damaging greenwashing has become endemic – to stamp it out we need to legislate bans on all fossil fuel advertisements, just like what happened with tobacco.”

The analysis also looked at “snippets”, which are not paid-for but are chosen by Google’s algorithm as the most relevant result. The Guardian found the snippet chosen for “fracking” linked to the website of an oil and gas lobby group, the Independent Petroleum Association of America.

In answer to the question: “Is fracking a threat to public health?”, the IPAA page states: “No. In fact, there is ample evidence that increased natural gas use … has improved public health by dramatically improving air quality in recent years.”

A years-long piece of research by the US Environmental Protection Agency concluded in 2016 that in some cases fracking had harmed drinking water supplies.

Unlike Facebook, Google does not have a publicly accessible ad library, meaning it is difficult to analyse advertising on the platform. In the EU and UK, Google only provides comprehensive data on ads which directly mention politicians or a political party, or those which feature a referendum question.

A spokesperson for Google said: “We recently launched a new policy that will explicitly prohibit ads promoting climate change denial. This policy applies to all advertisers, including energy companies and financial institutions, and we will block or remove any ads that contain violating content.”

A spokesperson for ExxonMobil said: “ExxonMobil has contributed to the development of climate science for decades and has made its work publicly available. And as the scientific community’s understanding of climate change developed, ExxonMobil responded accordingly.”

Aramco and Goldman Sachs did not respond to requests for comment.

Read more:
Fossil fuel firms among biggest spenders on Google ads that look like search results

Following a surge in online scams, Facebook, Microsoft and Twitter are to follow the example of Google and ban any advertisements for financial companies that are not registered with the City regulator

Fraud carried out by fake investment firms advertising on search engines or social media has skyrocketed during the pandemic, with losses almost doubling from £55.2 million in the first half of 2020 to £107.7 million in the same period this year.

UK Finance, the banking industry body, described the level of fraud as a “national security threat”.

Online platforms have been heavily criticised in the past for taking payments for adverts from fraudulent companies without doing appropriate checks, and this week a committee of MPs demanded that the government make them legally liable in its Online Safety Bill, which is set to be put before parliament next year.

A day after that announcement by the MPs, Facebook, Microsoft and Twitter said they would follow Google’s move, made in August, to refuse to allow any adverts on their platforms from companies not registered with the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).

Despite initial concerns that scammers would find a way around the measures by cloning existing companies on the FCA’s register, The Times revealed last month that the number of people falling victim to fraudulent websites on Google appeared to have collapsed since its move — with scammers now preying on their victims via platforms run by Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.

“It’s reassuring to hear that the online giants are finally taking a positive step in the right direction and stopping fraudulent advertisements from appearing on their sites,” Mel Stride, chairman of the Commons Treasury select committee, said.

“For too long, these companies have turned a blind eye to the criminality at play behind these scams.”

The technology giants made their announcement jointly through the Online Fraud Steering Group, a little-known body of which they are all members. They said they would “introduce a revised advertising onboarding process that requires … financial services advertisers to be authorised by the FCA”.

The announcement did not specify when the move would come into effect, adding: “Each company will operate their own processes and have differing timelines for when the policies will come into place.”

Read more:
Tech giants crack down on adverts for financial scams

Today, businesses have various options to promote their brands, products, and services. At the same time, due to the abundance of options, customers have doubts about which product or service to choose.

That’s why marketers appeal to authority and apply an influencer marketing strategy to promote goods.

In this article, you will know about fundamental influencer marketing tactics and some advanced tips on how to do influencer marketing right from the beginning.

What is Influencer Marketing

Before all, influencer marketing is a way for companies to promote their goods or services on social media with the help of people (influencers) who are authorities for the companies’ target audience. In other words, the brands contact influencers who agree to share the information about, discuss, or promote certain products among their audience.

As their followers appeal to them, consider them experts, or see them as role models, the brands will likely get prospects interested. It works by the principle of social proof, yet, the effect is more substantial as the influencer’s opinion and reach are more significant compared to ordinary methods.

How to Build an Influencer Marketing Strategy

To create an effective influence marketing strategy, you should take a structured and well-thought method. What does it mean? It implies having a plan, a clear objective, and using the available resources for greater results.

To achieve influencer marketing effectiveness, you should know why you will approach specific influencers and what they will bring you. Sounds simple? Yet, it will need thorough influencer marketing research so that you can align your vision with the influencer’s ideas.

From where to start? Consider the following influencer marketing activities:

1. Set the goal

When starting an influencer marketing strategy, you need to understand what you want to achieve. You may want to raise awareness about the product, improve sales, increase engagement, or generate leads, among other things. When you define it, you can switch to the next step.

2. Pick the right platform

Well, at this stage, you should reflect on where your audience hangs out and consider what dividends it can bring to you. For instance, if you target bloggers, then a guest post on an authoritative website or blog can be a solution.

If you are selling fashion goods with an aesthetic look, Instagram can be good. Notably, pick the place where you can find your audience, and do not forget about influencer marketing blogs.

3. Find influencers

The influencers should match your values and have similar values to make your influencer strategy work. That way, it would be organic. In this regard, you have to find the influencer that will match your goal, values, and vision you have. If you have a B2B niche, you need an expert with experience.

For general use products or those related to the fashion niche, you can resort to social media celebrities or bloggers. Yet, remember that you should make sure the influencer’s audience fits within your buyer’s persona. Thus, you may have a whole pool of influencers to select from.

4. Contact them

As soon as you have determined the influencer within the pool resulting from the research, you need to contact them. In the case of the social media opinion leaders, you have the function of a direct message. Besides, they usually leave their email in the bio. For experts with their blogs, you can use email finders that will help to find emails based on the corporate domain. In the case of LinkedIn, you can take advantage of email finder extensions.

5. Set the agreement

Online influencer marketing implies that you give the power to the influencers to promote a brand. In this regard, a brand may want to define the responsibilities and roles for parties to the collaboration. For instance, you may want to give more freedom in the content creation or development of your message. It is essential to find common ground where your values are underlined and the content suits the influencer. Moreover, there you can define the performance indicators to track the results and evaluate the effect.

Tips For Advanced Influencer Marketing

The block above illustrates the fundamentals of developing an influencer marketing plan. However, the effectiveness of the influencer marketing campaign usually depends on how you approach the influencers, engage with them, and concentrate on vital elements. A marketer should also focus on influencer marketing research and the creation of the vision. Let’s look at some of the influencer tips you can use:

Nurture before contacting

Before writing to any influencer, it is better to develop relationships. The best influencer marketing tactics contemplate following their posts and commenting on them for a while. Firstly, it will give you an idea of how they share content and whether your values align. Next, it will provide you with enough insights to develop understanding, as you will be able to provide value.

Also, writing comments and participating in their discussion will make you look familiar to them. It is important when you decide to extract their email with the email finder and send a letter to their inbox all of a sudden.

Besides, it is a good idea to nurture them as they grow. You can offer them products, and your coverage will improve with their growth. That’s why one-time cooperation is not advised, as the long-term partnership will likely bring you a sustainable effect.

Focus on audience

When you do influencer marketing research, concentrate on the audience you want to influence instead of influencers. The main reason is to affect them via your content and solutions. Thus, your main question should be, “Would the post or content piece be helpful for the influencer’s audience and simultaneously add to your promotion?”

In this regard, you can combine several tactics. Firstly, analyse the information you have on your audience. You can use some tools to create a map of your customer journey and combine them with influencer marketing programs. Then, find out where your prospect comes from. If you ask the most active users, they will give you insights.

After evaluating the customer persona, do the search on the landscape within social media. You can analyse hashtags, experts, topics, anything that allows knowing the trends. From there, you can find the best influencer and offer value that will answer the audience’s needs, benefitting both you and an influencer.

Communicate having a channel and context in mind

Importantly, when you design the influencer marketing strategy, you should see that the campaigns would be different depending on the platform. LinkedIn needs more facts and opinions; YouTube requires video integration, while Instagram users favour aesthetic looks.

Besides, the context sets the style of communication and the perception of the brand. If you see that the expert is rather informal with their followers, then pick the same communication style for your campaign. However, remember about your positioning and the image you want to project. It is important that the existing image and the one desired for the campaign are not in conflict with one another.

Favour engagement, not followers

Another critical thing to consider is the analysis of engagement. Nowadays, there are many people with followers. Yet, what matters is engagement. It defines the visibility of posts in social media and the effect of the sponsored post. For instance, you can find a person with five thousand followers, yet, if they have low engagement, you would want to pick a person with high engagement and 3 thousand followers, for instance.

For a brand, engagement plays a critical role, primarily if the audience is not differentiated. That’s why to look at how the audience reacts to influencer’s posts and whether your products would be interesting to it.

Give them freedom on content producing

Lastly, today many influencers have their content plans and vision of creating content. In this regard, a marketer should trust their idea of how to proceed with promotion campaigns. It is in the influencer’s interest to create content that will be exciting for their followers. Besides, they know them better.

Nevertheless, you need to define the boundaries which shall not be crossed concerning your values and brand’s perception. Try to document them in the agreement so that if any dispute arises, you can determine who is responsible.

Read more:
Advanced Influencer Marketing Tips

Every year, Black Friday kicks off a pivotal time of year for many small businesses – from independent retailers, to fully digital companies.

However, it’s becoming more and more challenging to stand out of the crowd. There are some key tips and tricks for getting set up, and maximising your online presence around this time, and it’s not too late to get the ball in motion.  Peggy de Lange, VP International Expansion at online marketplace, Fiverr explains how.

Offer Promotional Bundles

Do you have products or services that compliment one another? If so, think about how you can bundle them together and offer someone a deal they can’t refuse. Product bundles can be a great option for pushing a customer over line.

Offer Pre Orders

If you have products that are high in demand, pre-ordering products lets you adjust the stock levels and manage the potential of running out of stock early. If you can keep track of supply and demand you can maintain sales throughout the season and stay on top of operations no matter how busy it gets.

Attract Repeat Custom

Make sure that the customers who bought from you on Black Friday will also buy from you in the future. You can regularly inform these customers about new products through newsletters or loyalty cards. This will be advantageous over the Christmas season when your customers are already looking to buy presents. If they had a good shopping experience with you and your advertising has caught their attention, you may turn first time customers into loyal customers. That’s why customer experience is so important, and shouldn’t be compromised even during busy periods.

Social media

Social media is king. Whole businesses are built on social platforms and taking the time to get this right could be make or break. Take a look at your company’s social media presence, is it updated frequently? Consider whether it’s tailored to your audience and effectively represents your brand. Social profiles such as Instagram are good forums to inform customers of new products and promotions and keep them engaged with your brand. The more social media platforms you are on, the larger the audience you will reach – but remember, quality over quantity is essential.

Advertising

One of the easiest ways to generate sales quickly is by running ad campaigns, be it Facebook, Instagram or Google ads. If you set these ads up correctly, you will immediately get sales or at least data about your customer base that helps you to optimise your product portfolio. Understanding your audience is a valuable way to gauge supply and demand on the run up to Black Friday and throughout the festive season.

Customer service

Customers are used to good service and this can be a great differentiator for you. Personalised and efficient support continues to grow in demand so you should look at how  customers can get in contact with you. If the answer is only by mail, this is probably not sufficient -ake a look at chatbots, a phone hotline or maybe even WhatsApp support. Depending how busy your business is, it may be valuable to outsource this service. Digital marketplaces such as Fiverr allow you to hire specialist freelance talent who can support during busier periods such as Black Friday.

Consider freelance support

Digital freelancers specialise in many of the online tactics to help small businesses thrive. Consider bringing on freelance support to help with everything from your festive season sales imagery, your social advertising strategy or even working with influencers. Hiring a freelancer means you can dial up and dial down support during those peaks and troughs.

Start early

Did you start marketing your products early enough this year? Starting early is advised for a successful festive season. Customers are used to seeing products and ads for Black Friday products starting early November so if you didn’t manage that this year, ensure it’s part of your strategy for the next one. Being proactive is a good way to ease your company into the festive season and maximise potential sales throughout. Nevertheless, working with specialist freelancers that can maximise your brand in a short time frame is a good alternative.

Read more:
From Black Friday to the Festive Season: 8 tips for small businesses to stand-out

Marketers were faced with the loss of cookie data, but this move to a cookie-less world was then postponed. Meanwhile, an increase in ‘opt-out’ legislation, has led to a reduction in the amount of data available to drive B2B marketing strategies and fuel campaigns.

Jon Clarke, Founder and Chief Product Officer of Cyance, a leading provider of European intent data, has reviewed the current landscape and shares his thoughts on how the data landscape will shift in 2022, and how B2B marketers can capitalise.

As the tracking cookie continues to crumble, the big question on marketers minds is ‘what will we do now?’. How are we supposed to understand our customers and future proof our tech stack and marketing strategy?

The good news is, despite all of the change and uncertainty, 2022 will provide plenty of opportunities for B2B marketers to re-define their use of data, driving better engagement with prospects and optimizing their campaign performance.

Cookies will be yesterday’s tech by the end of 2022

Whilst the cookie deprecation has been delayed, more and more people are opting out of cookies. Firefox and Safari have already blocked tracking cookies by default, and Google itself has announced that it won’t roll out alternative user-level ad identifiers as a replacement for third-party cookies. Making cookies a null and void entity, long before the deprecation deadline.

As such, B2B marketers will turn their backs on cookies over the coming months and will need to look towards MarTech and AdTech to provide a longer term solution that generates the same, if not better, insights into customers and prospects. One such solution is Universal IDs.

B2B marketers will come to realise the potential of Unified IDs

Unified IDs present an opportunity for the marketing industry to thrive in a cookie-less world by building a unique ID for users that can be tracked across the entire digital ecosystem, without the need for additional syncing. Unified IDs represent a personal, static, exchangeable, and interoperable identifier for each user, taking into account their multiple touchpoints.

Already we’re seeing innovative B2B marketers exploiting the numerous advantages that Unified IDs have over cookies. Firstly, they have a longer shelf life than cookies, making it much easier to build audiences, attribute behaviour trends and measure activation outcomes over time. Plus, Unified IDs work in an omnichannel manner by definition, and I expect to see an expansion of data sources beyond the traditional and including more modern channels such as SmartTVs and wearables. Finally, I predict that the increased use of Universal IDs will translate into much more reliable and accurate data for the marketer, providing a wider picture of intent.

A seismic shift towards Account-Based Marketing (ABM)

2021 has already seen a significant shift to Account-Based Marketing (ABM), with 70% of marketers reporting that they use ABM, up from 15% from 2020. But I expect to see this dynamic accelerating even further over the next 12 months.

More and more B2B marketers are experiencing the benefits of a personalised and targeted approach in their campaigns. We now have the required technology and the accurate data – it’s only a matter of time until we reach 100% ABM within B2B.

ABM provides a much more personalised marketing approach, encourages both marketing and sales teams to align, and as a result, it shortens the sales cycle. ABM is so much more precise and measurable than traditional approaches, providing clearer ROI and more efficiency in marketing and sales teams.

ABM is also a more tempting solution for marketers as marketing expenditure, as a percentage of revenue, is at its lowest point in over a decade. Marketers are looking for solutions that do more with less. ABM does just that, its efficient and targeted form of outreach results in less wastage than traditional mass advertising and less targeted digital strategies.

Quality over quantity in B2B data

For years, the sales and marketing industry has been of the opinion that, when it comes to data, the more the better, quantity over quality! This has been particularly true during the pandemic, where many businesses have tried to make up for in-person and telephone sales. Instead choosing to reach out through digital content and channels, without truly appreciating the buying stage, or digital journey of the modern B2B buyer. As a result, we’ve seen that buyers are feeling inundated with messaging that lacks context and relevance.

So, as B2B demand generation teams become cognisant of this, I expect to see a much needed shift in attitudes in 2022, with marketers looking to strip down their use of data to focus only on the most useful, relevant and accurate insights. By cutting through the data noise which has become such a distraction over recent years, marketers can instead concentrate on getting a clear view of buyers’ intentions and their position in their buying journey. Nothing else really matters, and this is something greater numbers of B2B marketers will recognise over the next 12 months.

Marketers will integrate data to get a complete view of the customer

Finally, in line with a streamlined set of data points, I also expect marketers to look to remove data silos and integrate all of their insights into one unified platform. This will allow them to generate a much clearer and more accurate picture of their audiences.

In particular, I expect to see more integration between different data sources, such as 1st party and 3rd party intent data. This in turn will be layered with wider insights such as firmographic and technographic data. In doing so, B2B marketers will begin to get a full view of the customer.

B2B marketers that embrace these shifts in the data landscape, and adapt their strategies and campaign activations accordingly, will undoubtedly come out on top next year.

Read more:
How the shifting data landscape will re-shape B2B marketing in 2022