I don't make a habit of sharing office forwards, they're rarely funny or relevant. This example however, is both of those things - even if it is a little unkind about Google +. (Although I'm still undecided on that one myself)

By Giles Ivey

Online advertising needs to be more transparent, accountable, and also more engaging. Marketers who believe that engagement starts and ends with the click of a Facebook ‘like’ button are missing the point.

We need to think about how brands can move away from more traditional ‘look-click’ ads, and instead work towards building stunning creative that drives deeper audience engagement and participation. This type of creative can deliver measurable results with the metrics that marketers need to demonstrate ROI.

The term ‘engagement’ has come under fire lately. The great marketing buzzword is now seen as little more than smoke and mirrors term designed to get brands to part with their cash. Perhaps that’s a little melodramatic, but we are seeing a backlash from brands against some of the traditional forms of engagement marketing because much of this activity is inherently unaccountable.

Flooding Liverpool Street station with dancers at 11am is one tactic, but this type of stunt engagement is at best difficult quantify. It’s also somewhat haphazard in that it is almost impossible to know exactly who will be passing through the station at that time. That’s not to say it isn’t a clever marketing trick to raise awareness of a brand or product, but in these tough times brand owners need something more than ‘clever’; they need results. They need to be able to see people interacting with their brands and they need to know their campaigns are delivering. Unfortunately, much of the time, we don’t really know that this is happening. Yes we can surmise, or guess, but we don’t know for sure.

The fact is, to corrupt the famous line from Orwell’s Animal Farm, some forms of engagement are more equal than others. For one thing marketers seem obsessed with Facebook ‘likes’, but what is the real value of this if brands are driving people to Facebook but then doing little with them once they are there? It would be interesting to see exactly how many people come back to a branded Facebook page after clicking the ‘like’ button. Currently these stats are conspicuous in their absence.

Like for like's sake: The rush for empty engagement

For engagement to work, it needs to lead to a consumer action rather than simply being engagement for engagement’s sake. Clicking the ‘like’ button is not enough…spending time with a brand online, sharing something on social networks or making an online purchase directly from an ad are actions that can be measured and quantified.

Over the past decade, we have seen an increasing migration away from traditional media towards digital. This has led to brands looking for new ways to connect with their target audiences. Times were a lot easier for marketers when all they had to worry about was which paper to run their ads in and what time slot to show their TV ad. Today they have a raft of choices, yet the reality is consumers are most likely to interact with brand advertising online or on some sort of mobile device.

However, the current structure of online advertising leaves a lot to be desired. The go-to model for online advertising is CPM (cost per thousand), with brands paying every time someone navigates to the page their ad is on. Not surprisingly CPM doesn’t deliver staggering results – an industry standard of 0.3% or 3 clicks out of every 1000 page impression, and how many of those are people clicking on them by accident?

CPE (cost per engagement) on the other hand is a model that delivers transparent and measurable results, as well as a click through rate of 1% (almost 300% more than CPM). How does it work? By putting a time delay on expanding online ad units (normally a 3-2-1 countdown), advertisers are only charged once the online ‘experience’ has fully loaded – this removes charging for any erroneous rollovers. These online experiences can include anything from video, to games, to social network interactions. And they are also measurable. We can tell exactly how long people have stayed with the brand experience, what they have done and also, where they have interacted with a social network - way beyond anything you could possibly hope for via CPM.

The fundamental basis of CPE is about creating online experiences that encourage consumers to undertake an action on behalf of the brand – sharing, posting, tweeting, starting a conversation or watching a video. Through CPE consumers spend an average of around 23 seconds with brands. This is as powerful as any other form of engagement marketing channel and can be crucial when it comes to building relationships between brands and audiences.

No media channel is 100% measurable and there are faults with every measurement. But an engagement online when you are putting a message in a certain environment, where you know your target market will be and only paying when someone actually spends time with your brand, has got to be more appealing – and indeed more transparent – than trying to capture the attention of whoever happens to be walking through Liverpool Street at 11am on a Tuesday morning.

Giles Ivey is UK Managing Director of SAY Media.

The idea of brands telling stories is a hot topic right now. Coca-Cola is all about "liquid and linked" content, Heineken has had some amazing success with its global content strategy and the theme at this year's Festival of Media is based on the "science of storytelling".

Popular wisdom suggests that the future of brand content lies in video, and video is undoubtedly an exciting and powerful medium, but the popularity of e-readers and tablets has revitalised the written word, albeit in digital form.

In our experience, the tablet edition of Wired is the standard by which other digital magazines should be judged. The technical team at Condé Nast has created a superb platform for brands. Full page ads still appear in the ‘book’, but they are now rich with content and limited only by the imagination of the advertiser.

The whole content paywall debate still continues; but users are culturally adapting to the idea of paid-for content and its value over the free general clutter that is the bulk of the internet, as demonstrated by this infographic:

The news:

Galerie, a department store in Osaka, marked its January sales by hanging huge red signs emblazoned with the term ‘FUCKIN’ SALE’ in their windows and throughout the store.

Images of the store’s chosen catchphrase rapidly flooded social media websites and blogs. Once Galerie’s horrified managers caught wind of the uproar caused by the signs, they hastily tore them down. The store also released a public statement apologizing for any offence the slogan may have caused.

Behind the News:

It was revealed that the headline had been crafted as a pun on the Japanese term ‘fukubukuro’, meaning ‘lucky bags’. This relates to the Japanese New Year retail custom where unwanted stock from the previous year is discounted and sold in big grab bags.

However, the attempted pun was lost on English speaking visitors and while a lot of the speculation online discusses the hilarity of the signs, the store also received many complaints.

This is not the first time that the term ‘fuck’ has been used for marketing purposes. In 1997, British clothing retailer French Connection began branding their clothes with the slogan ‘fcuk’. Though it was officially an acronym for French Connection United Kingdom, its similarity to the word ‘fuck’ caused much controversy. French Connection fully exploited this and produced a popular range of t-shirts with messages including ‘fcuk this’, ‘hot as fcuk’, ‘fcuk me’ and ‘fcuk her’.

In 2009, the European Union's trademarks agency disallowed a German brewery to market a beer called ‘Fucking Hell’ until the brewery sued, claiming that the beer was actually named after the Austrian village Fucking, and the German term for light beer, ‘hell’.

In this case, it is clear that the profane caption represents a take on a Japanese pun that was lost in translation and a misunderstanding of the term ‘fuck’ due to a language barrier, rather than an attempt to draw attention to the store. Nonetheless, this controversial slogan has certainly put the Japanese department store on the map.

by Bambos Neophytou.

The combining trends of social-commerce and increasingly accurate user-data will enable highly targeted campaigns for socially connected audiences or small groups of friends.

Earlier this year, I made a number of predictions for 2012, one which we have already seen evidence of, which was the return of heritage formats: articles in the British press last week reported how “A spokesman for HMV has said that the high street chain is planning to step up the amount of vinyl it stocks in response to demand from customers.”

Another trend Inferno is confident we will see realised this year is the one we called ‘Friendship Groups are the New Target Audiences’. What we mean is that marketing departments and agencies will create products, offers, campaigns aimed at discreet and specifically identified groups of individuals who are connected socially based on four key motivations:

1. Widespread dissatisfaction with current consumer targeting models
2. Social media makes newer targeting possible (Youtube, Flikr, Facebook, Twitter,etc)
3. Advanced analytics deliver increasingly accurate data on coherent social groups (statistical analysis, predictive modelling, behavioural targetting)
4. The irrefutable logic that trusted peer recommendation (word of mouth from your family and friends) is the biggest single influence on brand behaviour and purchase

Even a brief discussion of each of these ingredients, would be beyond the scope of this piece, so let’s assume 1 and 2 are understood and accepted and deal with the plugging in of the old truth of 4 into the modern marketing engineering of 3.

The truest truism is sometimes the least fashionable thing to say. No one gets a applauded for pointing out that word-of-mouth recommendation is the biggest single influence on brand behaviour and purchases. But this is the crux of why targeting friendship groups make so much sense.

By targeting comparatively small groups of peers through social digital media, brands have never been in a better place to use the overwhelmingly powerful force of peer-endorsed recommendation and mutual endorsement.

How this plugs into 3 can be seen in how the advanced analytics is quietly and behind the scenes revolutionising how we do marketing. Advanced analytics is being used to model customer data and make accurate predictions about which messages, channels and offers are more likely to elicit positive responses from the audience.

An example, on a macro scale, is Adobe’s use of the tools made available to it through the company called MarketShare Analytics to optimise its marketing activity on a weekly basis to reach its targets. For an example on a micro scale take a look at the examination of how time, weather and mood (among other variables) can all be factored into mobile behavioural targeting in the ‘Next Best Offer’ article (Harvard Business Review, Dec. 2011). Reaching individuals with personalised offers at the right time (so often thought of as the Holy Grail in promotional marketing) is not only within reach, but is being practised as we speak by the cutting edge people in your field.

The next obvious step is to tailor offers to the shared interests of a group of friends.  Social media community managers working on behalf of brands already identify coherent groups within their followers and friends. All it takes is for the visionary marketing/product clients to produce assets designed to the uniquely detailed understanding that community managers can give them of the groups available to talk to.

And so back to ingredient number 1: There has always been something vaguely unsatisfactory with the idea of ‘the target consumer’. Apart from being a fiction made up of patches of statistical data, it rarely does the main task it is supposed to, that is create a clear target for communications and marketing activity. Instead, it fills the world with jargonistic labels for demographic groups and spurious pen-portraits of no-one in particular. But it is the ‘particular’ that characterises and defines us as individuals who respond to marketing messages. Roderick White has written eloquently about this: “within a given category market, true segmentation is hard to discern: on most criteris customers of competing brands are broadly similar … segmentation is not just frustrating but pointless and has been roundly condemned in the academic literature as technically unsound” (Roderick White in Admap, quoted in  Guilt Trip, Hesz & Neophytou, 2010, p.76).

But perhaps, like ethical foreign policies and benevolent banks, the target consumer is a myth most of us dangerous free-thinkers can abandon.  By targeting real people in their real social groups we can lead the way forward. Both the ability of the marketing community to engage with individuals and the explicit opting in by individuals to commercial messaging has never been greater. So it is up to those who can see this opportunity to make it happen.

Bambos Neophytou is head of strategy at Inferno.

This infographic discusses the psychology of colours and their importance in how we react to them. Ignore the home decoration business at the top, and there are some interesting insights for brands further down. For instance, it turns out that the real secret of KFC’s success is the fact they use a lot of red, a colour known to stimulate appetite. And I thought it was all down to that secret blend of 11 herbs and spices. 

BETC Euro RSCG reportedly have a new logo. Now I quite like BETC's work, its recent 'Pronounce responsibly' campaign for Cockburn's port is really good. I could even live with the constant Boris-bashing that dominates the company blog. But the new logo is a bit rubbish. The Wifi bee is cute, but the logo typeface, to me at least, says more 'provincial 1970s high street' than '21st century advertising agency'. 

A recent video gathering a lot of attention on YouTube tracks what could be the first journey into space by a Lego man. This isn't an official mission by Lego, but a more amateur effort by a team in Canada. Full footage of the trip and its preparation will be released soon, but for now you can enjoy this astonishing trailer. 

A few brands have ventured into space, or at least the fringes of it, for the occasional marketing stunt. Adrenaline junkie Felix Baumgartner threw himself out of a plane at the outer reaches of Earth's atmosphere for Red Bull and Sappuro in Japan sold a limited edition beer brewed from barley grown in space. Toshiba decided to launch a collection of chairs into space, which probably made more sense at the time - but nevertheless made for some striking visuals.