Agencies
The BBC has sacked Proximity London over licence fee warning letters containing false statistics. The Sunday Telegraph broke the story of how the BBC's TV Licensing arm has fired Proximity London, just days after the agency won a DMA gold for work on the account. Proximity was told that its contract would be re-tendered after millions of letters reminding viewers to pay their licence fee were found to contain false statistics, the Sunday Telegraph revealed. The corporation took the action after it was forced to admit, following an investigation by The Sunday Telegraph, that 6.6 million inaccurate letters had been sent by its TV Licensing arm over the past three years. Proximity told the BBC that it is taking disciplinary action. The investigation was launched after one viewer complained that he had received two similar letters from TV Licensing on the same date.The Sunday Telegraph, 14 December 2008
Targeting
BSkyB is planning to launch a targeted advertising service called Smart TV by 2011, writes Rowena Mason in The Sunday Telegraph. BSkyB commercial director, Stephen Nuttall, said that using complex demographic information gathered from its opted-in subscribers, each television set will soon be sent specific adverts according to the age, sex, lifestyle preferences and viewing habits of its owner. "It really is innocuous stuff - the closest parallel is really direct marketing, which no one gets upset about," says Adrian Stroud, a consultant who helps develop the technology for BSkyB. The Sunday Telegraph, 30 November 2008
Electricity and gas giant E.ON is trialling a new approach to optimised marketing largely driven by models built by analytics software from supplier KXEN. CRM website reported the news from KXEN's two-day international user conference. E.ON's head of CRM, Mark Perrett, told the conference that in theory, uplifts of around 30 per cent on the current performance of the energy company's one-to-one marketing were achievable by using the models. crmdirectory.com, 30 November 2008
Social networks
Social net spending will be even lower than thought next year, reports, quoting data from consultants eMarketer. Advertisers will only have spent $1.2bn on social media ads by the end of this year - down 14% from its prediction of $1.4bn in May. And the researcher is curtailing its prediction of social net spending growth by nearly 28% for next year as well: from its projection of $1.8bn to $1.3bn next year. The recession and slower-than-expected revenue growth at MySpace are two main reasons for this cut. The Guardian, 11 December 2008
Database marketing
An IT manager of a Canadian DM agency has been accused of absconding with a copy of the company's customer database, technology website reports. Nick Belmonte, the agency's vice president of IT, has been accused of stealing a backup tape containing names and information about 3.2 million customers, worth potentially more than $10 million, when he left the firm in November. The tape also contained credit card and bank account information of more than 800,000 customers. Although the backup tape was encrypted, the tape contained information and programs that would allow a knowledgeable user to decrypt the data. The clients to whom the customers belong is not reported.byteandswitch.com, 1 December 2008
Experian, the business information and marketing analytics group, is axing up to 300 jobs in its UK and Ireland operations, reports. To what extent Experian's marketing operation, Experian Integrated Marketing, will be affected, is not known. The Nottingham-based company will enter a 90-day consultation period with its 4,000 staff in January, after flat half-year results in the UK and sales hit by banks and financial institutions less willing to lend and carrying out fewer credit checks. Charlotte Hogg, managing director of Experian in the UK, said the precise number of roles to be cut will depend on how the business performs in the next few months. Thisisnottingham.co.uk, 3 December 2008
Will US president-elect Barack Obama live up to the marketing promise of his election victory and use direct channels to make government more transparent and interactive? "There has been an expectation created," concedes one person who has been advising the Obama team on its use of the internet, the reports. Simon Rosenberg, president of NDN, a progressive think-tank, predicts that the internet will become a central medium for Obama to communicate with voters and test policy ideas. "It allows him to speak more directly to his people than ever before," he says.
How to make use of the campaign database containing 13 million email addresses, including details of 3 million donors - is the immediate question for the Obama camp. Rosenberg says the new president is likely to use it as an "advocacy network" to further his policies: "He will call on the American people to help him pass his agenda." Financial Times, 8 December 2008
A new law against junk e-mail has taken effect in Israel. It is unusually strict, the comments, both in the definition of junk mail and in the penalties imposed. The Israeli law combines the strictures of US, EU and UK anti-spam legislation: identifying information, explicit advance permission and an opt-out option. But it goes further, in that the recipient can seek a fine directly from the spammer. Another difference: the EU directive refers to ‘direct marketing'. The Israeli law has a broader definition that would seem to include charity donation solicitation. The Jerusalem Post, 4 December 2008
Direct mail
In a direct echo of UK postman Roger Annies' protest against door drops, which sparked DM's so-called Summer of Discontent in September 2007, a US postman has been fined and given community service for failing to deliver direct mail, the reports. Steven Padgett was charged with delaying and destroying mail and fined $3,000 as well as 500 hours of community service. Padgett's protest, the LA Times says, has sparked support from locals including a "Steve Padgett for president" campaign. The US DMA was quick to respond to the outcry. Eight of 10 people actually look at such mail, and a "large percentage" take advantage of coupons and discounts, said Sandy Cutts, the association's public affairs director. Los Angeles Times, 22 November 2008
Direct mail will form part of the national campaign being mounted by the Portman Group, the body formed by drink manufacturers, asking consumers to complain about irresponsible Christmas drinks advertising, reports Mark Sweney in . Mail will be used to target professions likely to come across irresponsible marketing through their work, such as trading standards and police licensing officers. The campaign is a response by the Portman Group, whose members include Diageo and Carlsberg, to a potential government crackdown on marketing practices this Christmas. The Guardian, 1 December 2008
Brands including O2, LoveFilm, Original Source, Diageo, HarperCollins and BBC Audio Books paid Royal Mail to include their product samples in the inaugural Royal Mail ‘Matter' box, a parcel of samples sent to 30,000 opted-in consumers last weekend. reports that more than 65,000 people have signed up to receive a Matter box, designed to fit through standard household letterboxes. Virgin Atlantic Airways' senior marketing services manager, Bill Gosbee, is quoted as saying that because consumers "actively opt in to receiving the mailing, they are already receptive before it arrives". Print Week, 3 December 2008
Direct mail and events are the two fundraising tactics most vulnerable in a recession, concludes an article entitled ‘A colder climate for giving' in the Irish Times. It examines the impact of the increasingly severe economic downturn in Ireland on donations to charities. Heads of fundraising and directors from Barnardos, Trocaire and Concern are quoted in the piece.The Irish Times, 4 December 2008
Integrated campaigns
A fall in income from direct mail has prompted The Salvation Army to return to TV advertising for its annual Christmas appeal, Third Sector magazine reports. The charity stopped running TV ads in 2003 and moved to direct mail because it was achieving better results. But Sarah Bryan, head of individual giving at the charity, said the charity was struggling to expand its mailing lists because people were increasingly shopping online instead of using traditional methods such as catalogues, which had been a useful source of data in the past. Online donor recruitment would not work for the charity, she said: "It could be a problem for us because we attract older supporters who don't use the web so much." Two adverts will run until January, supported by door drops and mailings. Third Sector, 3 December 2008
FMCG and retail website kamcity.com quotes SPAR marketing controller Adam Margolin talking about the grocer's pre-tracking of its new ‘Sorted' multi-channel campaign, due to break on TV on 17 December. £12 million is being spent on the campaign, and the retailer pre-tested it via online interviews with active purchasers aware of a SPAR store where they live or work. "The research has re-enforced our belief that the combination of the Sorted brand messages and direct mail elicits the most favourable brand response and action from consumers." kamcity.com, 2 December 2008
SMS
Evidence of how SMS is being integrated with DM comes from Mobile marketing agency Sponge, which researched British banks to discover how mobile marketing, particularly SMS messaging, was perceived and used. An article in BizReport tells how the first UK bank to use SMS was First Direct, which is now the largest text messaging bank in the UK, sending around 2.6 million text messages to customers every month. Of the seven British banks surveyed by Sponge, 29% used mobile to follow up on both above- and below-the-line activity such as television or direct mail. They all experienced a 20% or higher response rate. BizReport, 4 December 2008
Email marketing
A report on , quoting Chad White of the Retail Email Blog, said that email marketing activity in the US retail sector surged by 14 per cent in the week ending 28 November, the day after Thanksgiving also known as Black Friday. The Retail Email Index rose to a new high for the year to date, representing a 32 per cent month-on-month increase, Chad White reported. On average, each of the top 100 internet retailers sent more than 3.1 email marketing messages during that week. New figures from comScore showed that Black Friday sales rose by one per cent last week compared with the same day in 2007, beating expectations in the process. digitalresponsemedia.com, 2 December 2008
CRM
CRM tool supplier SugarCRM will give customers the ability to plug in feeds from third-party data sources like the business social-networking site LinkedIn, a news item in PC World reports. The new ‘Cloud Connectors' feature is part of the vendor's new SugarCRM 5.2 release, which will be available worldwide this month. The move has gone down well with CRM commentators. "It seems to me that offering the ability to connect CRM and social apps like LinkedIn makes sense," said Denis Pombriant, managing principal of Beagle Research Group in Stoughton, Massachusetts. "It's essential to the next iteration of CRM that we have good embedded social-networking tools." Pcworld.com, 7 December 2008
FMCG companies traditionally don't use CRM because of its cost relative to the price of a typical FMCG product. But new research, published on adage.com, is threatening to question this received wisdom. Forget the old maxim that 20% of customers account for 80% of sales, the article says. A year-long US study of more than 1,300 brands and 54 million shoppers by Catalina Marketing and the CMO Council found that 2.5% of consumers account for 80% of sales for the average FMCG brand. The research also identified that brands' core consumers spend big. The 1.2% of shoppers who account for 80% of Budweiser sales buy a whopping $170 worth of Bud annually. Numbers like these start to make a strong case for broader use of CRM among packaged-goods players, the article concludes. adage.com, 8 December 2008
Contact centres
As their finances go into meltdown, companies are scrambling to cut costs across the board - in every place but the right one, according to a new study on global productivity by Proudfoot Consulting. Take, for example, the contact centres that are the staple of the outsourcing industry. As customers, we know they are always busy - but most of their work is waste. Vanguard Consulting, which specialises in service organisation, estimates that, in financial services, 20 to 60 per cent of all calls represent 'failure demand' - demand caused by a previous error. In telecoms, the police and local authorities, a staggering 80 or 90 per cent of calls occur because of the same failure to provide proper service the first time around. The Observer, 7 December 2008
E-commerce
In a New York Times article headed ‘As economy dims, Crate and Barrel stays upbeat' the homewares store chain - owned by German mail order company Otto Group - advocates direct marketing as a core route to market. Barbara Turf, chief executive of Crate and Barrel, tells the NYT that some 25 percent of total sales are from its catalogue and online, 75 percent from stores. "The more you can encourage direct marketing sales, the better that ratio is for retailers today. Direct marketing has upside potential, the way consumers are changing their buying habits. More and more people are getting used to buying on the internet." The 163-store chain has more than 7,000 employees. New York Times, 28 November 2008
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