Retail Pops Up

Stores that pop up and disappear just as quickly, that’s the new way of retail innovation that sweeping across America. Make it an unexpected, shocking event and people will come, seems to be the new mantra, according to this story in The Economist. Using disused storefronts and even unused museums, as Target did here, popup retail is giving the struggling retail business in the US the mileage and publicity that traditional TV and newspaper advertising is not able to provide. Although pop-ups have been used as a marketing tool for more than five years, the weak property market makes them even more popular. Daffy’s, a discount retailer not usually known for its choice zip code, opened a pop-up in Manhattan’s chic West Village this week on the ground floor of an apartment building that had been tenantless. Hermes, Gucci and Brooks Brothers, all luxury retailers, have opened temporary shops in East Hampton this summer. Their leases are only a few months long, just enough to ride out the peak season. For the ailing Mall business, unexpected arrival of pop up stores could offer a lifeline. More in the Economist

The World’s Most Engaged Brands

A new study from Altimeter Group and digital marketing agency Wetpaint recognizes the companies that are at the forefront of using social media to keep people engaged. Steve Rubel writing on Adage analyses the Engagement Database ranking says “good use of social media could be seen as a proxy for an innovative culture, eagerness to engage with consumers and take risks, a net positive for any business.” Out on the Engagement Database there is a simple 5 question test to see how your company ranks along side the brands that are rated at the very top. Try it here. Read Steve’s analysis on the study here

Accountable Marketing. The Formulae According To Viralblog

The crisis will offer tremendous opportunities to agencies with an accountable DNA, ones that also focus on driving marketing and sales. We have plenty of advertising agencies who only care about their cool TV commercial. And plenty of media agencies who think that “reaching people cheap” is their only and ultimate goal. Agencies will need to shift to the same marketing reality: if they want to build long term relationships with clients, they should get their heads out of the sand and try to act like true partners for clients. More, and some very interesting numbers on Viral Blog

Scoops Of Love

Starbucks and Unilever got together to give out scoops of ice cream to people on the hour, every hour. Facebook users have to log on to the designated Facebook page to be able to share love from the 800 pints of ice cream that was available every hour. If they missed out on the scoop this hour, they could go on to share more scoops the next hour. Simple idea for a brand looking to create a bit of word of mouth. In Brandweek

Birth of a brand

The folks at Mattson Creative captured a logo being created on video. Worth a few minutes of your time

Post Digital Marketing

Wonderful deck from digital strategist Helge Tennø. 237 meaty slides that can keep your head buzzing for weeks. Worth a look.

Scam Ads Killing Advertising?

Lead piece in Adage a few weeks ago from Jeff Goodby. The original one has gone under a registration wall, here is a copy. It’s fast becoming clear, he says, that the majority of things we’re rewarding as an industry are either small or marginal efforts for legitimate clients, things we made for real clients that the clients seem not to have ever heard of, or out-and-out fakes. We’ve created a system that rewards work that is increasingly unknown to anyone outside the business. We have become connoisseurs of esoterica. And in the process, we’re becoming more about us, and less about changing the world. We are becoming irrelevant award-chasers. Nigel Hollis adds to the debate. Here

Future Of A Media Agency

It’s 2014. You’re walking into a global media agency that you last visited five years ago. The first thing you notice is that it does not appear to be organized too differently from how you remember it, apart from the fact that much of the buying process now looks like it is automated. There are client teams scattered around the agency, composed of a range of different specialists: a couple of TV buyers, a radio buyer, an online buyer and duo of planners. So far, so similar. However, on closer inspection you realize that there are some key differences. For a start, the TV buyers no longer call themselves TV buyers but instead are AV (audiovisual) buyers and their remit covers TV and online. They also seem to be talking about targeting and consumer behavior data much more than they did in the past. Read it all here

Service Design Takes Centrestage

Creativity Online, yes the magazine that talks about all things good in creativity, has a story on service design. Service design, says the story is getting more and more attention from design companies and service providers, as the impact of experience design has been proven to increase customer satisfaction and brand perception. This isn’t to say that service design is only about the customer’s experience; while that’s a big part of it, service designers also look at the delivery of the service, its operational efficiency, and its scalability from a design point of view. They focus on designing both the overall service, an intangible exchange like using a bank account or renting a car, and each of the touch points within the service, which may be tangible products like a bank statement, website or or rental car. Service designers map the way that a service is experienced over time and each of the interactions within the experience. More here

Uk Phone Users Don’t Use Phone For Making Calls

Interesting little news from UK, where up to 10% of all mobile phone users don’t use their mobile phones to make calls. And apparently up to 50% of all users surveyed make only one call a day. Texting, that’s what most people use their phones for. The data, from a survey by comparison site uSwitch of over 12,000 people, showed that over 60 billion texts are being sent per month, with around 67 sent per person on average. Full story on TechRadar