Digital Marketing Immediate Future

Digital Marketing

Sure, sure… high street economy is a bit on the low side with big franchises announcing closures of big flagship stores, but not everything is lost. The economy, though, is not sinking worldwide. Markets are just shifting towards the easier (at least for the consumer) e-commerce.

Facebook has decided to rename its Canvas ad format and along with the name change come a few new features. If for some rare and unexplained reason you haven’t heard of Facebook Canvas, here’s a recap: “Facebook Instant Experiences, formally known as Canvas, load instantly, they’re mobile-optimised and designed…

Many of its 44,000 Twitter followers were shocked at yesterday’s announcement that JD Wetherspoon will be closing all of its accounts across all social media platforms. The reasoning behind this bold decision however, remains relatively vague. Wetherspoon’s CEO, Tim Martin, listed a few reasons why he’s calling it…

Facebook’s Paid Media proposition is changing. After the data breach, and with GDPR coming up, it’s clear why they’re doing it. But, if you use Facebook for advertising, you’ll want to know what’s changing and how. As a Facebook partner, we’ve got all the finer details. In this week’s…

Anniversaries are a great opportunity to celebrate the high points from the last year. They also give brands an opportunity to devise a social campaign to make strengthen their brand messaging and appeal to a particular audience. For optimum success, they’re best celebrated alongside a news story,…

With digital ad spend growing year-on-year, 2017 was the year that overall digital ad spend finally surpassed TV spend. Total global digital ad spend came to a whopping $209 billion, which is a huge 41% of the entire market. TV is now trailing behind with a…

So, a six-year-old can now be on Social Media? Yes, you read that right! Facebook have released an App that targets parents with children younger than 13. This is Facebook’s first product aimed at children and they are not the first to focus on this large, untapped…

At IF, it’s been slowly and now concretely drummed into us: Christmas is coming. If your clients aren’t ready yet, then you need to be. Internally, it means designing our Christmas card, sorting the festivities and most importantly, making sure we are effortlessly ready to deliver everything before…

The online consumption of Sports Online sports viewing has been growing significantly and as consumer attention gets scattered across multiple platforms and devices, it is interesting to understand what major marketing players are doing to follow suit. Trends A positive problem? Opportunities arise for advertisers as a…

Reporting back to senior management with low conversion rates can become the bane of one’s life. And then to top it off, you are probably working extremely hard to persuade for more budget towards your social campaigns. It’s 2017, and you shouldn’t have to battle to prove…

It’s safe to say that the use of visual content is going to stick and there is a wealth of data that can be used to support the benefits of this type of content. On average, visuals perform 4.4 x better than text-based content and as…

How many times have you swayed away from social content, thinking, “What pile of absolute fluff?” That’s right- you are todays customer- a well-informed, savvy and socially aware individual who has access to vast sources of data which hold the truths & certainly the untruths of a brand.

Sometimes social gets a bad rep. This is due to the lingering hangover our industry is still suffering from the bad old days of “social rockstars”, “ninjas” and “gurus” who sold vanity metrics at a premium and contributed very little to actual business objectives.

We are all winding down for the festive period, and with that in mind, we have compiled an easy to digest blog consisting of 3 useful infographics to read… While you are eating your cold turkey sandwiches As an alternative to watching the Queen’s speech While feeling sorry…

There’s a story that Chip and Dan Heath tell in their book “Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die” that I think about often when creating B2B content for social. A Stanford University Graduate by the name of Elizabeth Newton ran…

Twitter’s new marketing campaign opens its doors to non-users clearing the misconceptions they have with the brand and its purpose. CMO Leslie Berland announces the new campaign saying that it’s content and ads will spread awareness of what Twitter has to offer and invite non-users to…

So the title of this blog was going to be way more offensive than I finally decided. I am just getting to the end of my tether with the use of ‘millennials’ as any sort of quality or useful market segmentation method. Let me break it down for…

Anyone who’s seen Peanuts knows the football gag. In it, Lucy challenges Charlie Brown to kick a football which she then moves just as he’s about to punt the life out if it. The joke ran yearly from 1951 to 1983 and yet every…

We presented at the B2B Summit recently, talking about paid social media. Interestingly, the question on everyone’s lips was; how much should social advertising cost? What are the benchmarks for investment and returns you can expect? Well, a Salesforce report (download) gives us some interesting…

From the adorable To the daring From the weird To the wonderful There can be no doubt that the internet loves a good GIF. And that love affair is growing stronger by the day. From 2012…

Sharing your thoughts and expertise can go along way with driving conversation and proving you’re a valuable Twitter contact. Twitter chats may seem like the last thing on your to do list but it’s worth the time and tweets. Answering industry leading conversations and networking with like-minded professionals…

Over the years I’ve sat in many meetings hearing statements like: “We need an idea for social!” or “take the ad campaign and ‘socialise it’.” Then there’s this little belter: “We need a viral video!” Or my personal favourite: “that’s a nice idea, let’s shove it on social…

Following in the footsteps of Facebook, LinkedIn is now working on its own version of Instant Articles, a feature that makes it possible for publishers to host fast loading, immersive mobile content, accessible instantly within LinkedIn, rather than linking users back to their own site. According to…

At IF, we pride ourselves on evolving. Curiosity is one of our brand values, championed daily by our fabulous staff. Our event format has been well received for many years but it was time to evolve. After a few months of planning and tinkering,…

Social listening is all the rage when it comes to analysing consumer behavior, determining people’s views of a brand, service or product and comparing a company’s public reputation to its competitors. One of the challenges social listening faces however is the vast majority of social users the internet classifies…

Getting your message across can be difficult in the digital age. People have very short attention spans and there is a lot of competition. Twitter allows 140 characters to get the job done, but data shows that tweets shorter than 100 characters get a 17% higher engagement…

In the last decade or so, social media has evolved into a data mining, user generated information goldmine, which is drawing ever more attention from those who can interpret the data and put it to good use. This is…

Freelancing gave me the freedom to experiment and share knowledge without major application. It was invaluable to me as usually social media newbies often land as a junior in an agency with little in the way of being able to experiment with serious application. I feel I was lucky to…

Everywhere you go right now the digital marketing world is talking about ‘moments’… Google have their ‘micro-moments’ story, brands are high-jacking moments everywhere to meet their marketing objectives and reach relevant audiences, heck, Twitter even added a new section to the platform called moments – and let’s…

Our team had the pleasure of going to a seminar by Getty Images talking about the visual trends for 2016. The event took place at their new exhibition offices in London, and it was organized by the lovely folks at The…

It struck me this week that social media is not really a new thing anymore. I know it sounds obvious. We have been doing it for 12 years. But this year it feels like social media got serious. Serious enough that it…

Last Spring, in a bid to increase the number of users, Facebook announced its plans to start letting brands and businesses use its Messenger app to handle customer service issues. Then, having reached over 700 million monthly active users last summer, they went public…

For many brands using social media to generate sales, the priority list often consists of lead generation, brand awareness, content creation, campaign management and customer service. Whilst all of these can play a major role in creating sales, one important item is missing from that list – online reviews.

Demographic data has always been key to any marketing or social strategy. After all, the most compelling campaigns were based on understanding what makes a target audience ‘tick’ – think of the Dove campaign for Real Beauty, the famous ALS Association’s…

Of all of the consumer tech and social media news coming out of #CES2016 last week, I wasn’t expecting news of a new Twitter ad product to be one of the most talked about. But with its ‘brand enthusiast gallery’ (purely a working title, I…

When I was writing this I did think to myself ‘aren’t we all sick of talking about post-millennials?’ But upon a bit of pre-Xmas digging and realising that these tech-savvy go-getters were going to save Christmas by vowing to spend more than ever before…

Back in Q1, 2014, Mark Zuckerburg announced Facebook’s $2.5 billion acquisition of Oculus VR, signalling his intention to bring virtual reality into mainstream digital life. Two years on and Facebook have finally begun taking pre-orders for Oculus Rift. That’s right you can now…

With the new year come new trends…yada yada yada yes. But there’s no denying, as we try to keep up with the cascading popularity of the annual Consumer Electronics Show or #CES2016, that there are some highlights of this year’s show that hold clear opportunities for…

New services like Facebook’s Instant Articles and Snapchat’s Discover allow publishers to host and monetise content on third-party social media platforms, without the need for users to click through to their site. Media publishers are currently uploading content on social media platforms in the hope users will click…

For many of you, tomorrow is the long awaited day. That’s right – there is only one more sleep until the theatrical release of the highly anticipated 7th Star Wars film – The Force Awakens! Unless you have been living under a rock, you will have noticed that…

As we near the end of 2015 I wanted to avoid a ‘social media trends for 2016’ style blog piece. Of course everyone will be eyes on for what is going to happen over the next 12 months, how the platforms will adapt and technology updates will take…

On 22nd of October, we welcomed back Rachel Kneen, O2’s social media manager, to our monthly Speakeasy to speak about the importance of content. Rachel has been working in social since 2009 – to put that into context, at that time, people spent more time on average on Myspace…

Mission from ‘M’, just in. You must infiltrate popular social media networks with highly dynamic content, and engage your targets where possible, as the Spectre network makes a worldwide offensive. You’ll have ‘paid’ support from Q branch in the form of cutting edge channel technology and the…

Apps have revolutionised speed-reading through displaying single words in rapid succession. These apps are based on a method known as Rapid Serial Visual Presentation, or RSVP. It’s nothing new and has been documented in cognitive psychology since the early 1970s, but with the rise of mobile and apps, its…

Social media levels the playing fields to building a brand in the modern age. The ability to be able to connect with the world at the click of a button means that with the right message/product/offering anyone can build a brand. As an individual, talented musician…

The sixth annual Social Good Summit took place last month at 92nd Street Y, a world-class cultural centre in New York. The star-studded summit coincided with the UN General Assembly and the Sustainable Development Summit, in which world leaders adopted 17 new Global Goals.

London Fashion Week 2015 witnessed brands lighting up the digital world, from Burberry’s use of Snapchat, Hunter Original’s use of Periscope, and Topshop’s use of Pinterest. The digital world has introduced brands to a limitless audience. The use of Pinterest and Instagram in London Fashion Week enabled brands…

In recent weeks there have been a few big stories surrounding Emoji that represent the turning of the tide as more and more social platforms adopt them as the future. Firstly Twitter have sold the first of their new offering “Admoji” or custom Emoji, to Coca-Cola to promote…

August is gone with the wind. With it go Notting Hill Festival, Reading 2015, V Fest, National Burger Day and summer. Relive the glory days of balmy summer evenings, sizzling barbeques and 30+ degree weather (sort of) by having a read through our top five IF blogs…

Apple’s recent announcement that it was going to be embracing ad blocking software has sparked some serious social debate and birth of the hashtag #adpocalypse. The move by Apple has brought into spotlight the morals and ethics behind the media industry and am sure will bring about…

Real-time engagement has been a real buzzword in 2015, but is it easier said than done? And how far are brands pushing the concept of real-time engagement? How realistic is it for brands to be ‘always on’? These are all questions that have been bandied around the industry…

What are your main objectives when your company attends an event? Leads? Awareness of new products and service? Positive brand interactions? Whatever your ultimate end goal is, more often than not, the marketing activities that I see, especially across digital and social, do not tie together with a clear…

Marketers around the world are pronouncing the death of demographic segmentation, and behavioural segmentation has swept in to pick up the pieces. Thanks to the digital invasion, marketers are armed with the tools to analyse consumers’ behaviour. And as we all know, this is called behavioural segmentation. This has…

Mark Zuckerberg will be hosting his 7th Town Hall Q&A session on Tuesday the 15th of September. This much anticipated event will provide the Facebook community, and a live audience at Facebook HQ, with yet another opportunity to quiz Zuckerberg on a range of (mostly)…

With Instagram Ads slowly rolling out to engagement-hungry marketers, and Twitter adding advanced coverage of all events as well as upping their game on Windows 10 and iPad Twitter apps – where does that leave the ever-dominant Facebook? With the…

All too often driving attendance to events in the B2B world is an afterthought. Companies spend hundreds-of-thousands of ££’s on set-up, stands, design, product and offline marketing and organisation. Then, in the weeks running up to the event, they realise they have not placed enough focus on making…

We call it ‘the power of a connected network’; uniting your workforce to harness the potential influence available on social. “Well that’s just social media tosh”, you might say. I assure you it is not. And here’s why: The most overlooked use of social is internal communications and…

YouTube has launched a new service designed specifically for gamers, YouTube Gaming, in a brazened attempt to compete with Twitch – a company that it lost out to Amazon in trying to buy last year – in the live streaming arena. While it…

When people think of paid advertising in social media they usually think of platforms like Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. Nothing wrong with that. They have hundreds of millions of users. But how about blog sites? Already blog sites offer thought-provoking…

Back in the pre-Kardashian era of 2002, HSBC ran a campaign called ‘the importance of local knowledge’ and it’s as relevant today as it was then. More specifically the importance of local dialect in relation to social media. This week…

Facebook has recently launched a dedicated messaging site similar to their Mobile messaging app that allows users to log in with their Facebook credentials and make phone calls, video calls, or text messages. With the launch of this new site, Facebook aims to integrate its…

We’re in the middle of the summer silly season – traditionally the time of year when there’s little actual news to report (unless of course, you consider air conditioning being sexist as headline news). And this is just as important for a social media strategy…

Now, there’s a question! The issue of one of three giants buying Twitter has started gaining some serious traction over the last few weeks. Those giants are, of course, Apple, Facebook and Google. Although there is a viable case for Apple to buy the flagging social network,…

Many marketers focus on customer loyalty. However, they may be chasing an unachievable goal. Loyalty is an emotion, usually referred to in terms of personal relationships, friends and family. It is a human emotion and not something which can be passed on to a brand or product. If we…

The oldest enemy of e-commerce has always been customer drop-off, losing potential customers during various points in your purchase funnel as they slip through the gaps in your carefully crafted user journey. It often left us feeling like Wile E. Coyote trying to catch Roadrunner. In-app commerce could…

On the 14th September 1987, the first email was sent from China to an international academic network. “Across the Great Wall,” the email proudly proclaimed, “we can reach every corner in the world.” Ironic, considering that the Chinese government has since blocked over 2,700 websites including Google, Facebook, Instagram,…

In honour of their 20th birthday, Amazon have declared today to be Amazon Prime Day and are celebrating in a big way with a 24 hour global sales extravaganza billed as having even more bargains up for grabs than Black Friday. With exclusive member-only deals…

Facebook is as much an evolving ecosystem of data as ever before. We proactively share what we care about with people we care about at some of the most revealing levels of intimacy. It is no wonder that among such an environment of personal information, marketers can use…

With more than 100 million daily users, and 71% of those falling into the 18-34 age bracket, many brands chasing younger demographics are now looking towards Snapchat as a way to engage with and market to their customers. Other than fear of…

Recently there has been a lot of talk about Twitter’s supposedly secret upcoming feature, Project Lightning, and it’s easy to see why. What we do know is that it will curate and display events-based content in rich feeds which will be visible whether the user is logged…

As hieroglyphics proved an effective form of communication for the ancient Egyptians, has the emoji, the digital hieroglyphic, revolutionised modern day communication in the same way? According to research conducted by TalkTalk Mobile, a phenomenal 80% of Brits are using emojis to communicate, there…

We all know the old cliché that content is king, and it is hard to argue. However, kings have a long and often bloody history of being toppled, so always need to be on their toes. They should be seen to be learning from and listening to their…

Twitter has been getting a lot of column inches recently for all the wrong reasons. For starters, though it launched officially in 2006, the company has yet to turn a profit. In 2014 it reported a pre-tax loss of £372m, despite raking in £908m…

What is the ‘best’ performing blog? Which piece of content performs the best on my website? What should we make more of? These are all questions I am used to hearing from clients. There are a number of ways to measure ‘success’ and ‘performance’ but before doing so…

Social Media is an incredibly fast paced and exciting industry in which new platforms, aps and blogs rapidly spring into the digital landscape. With social media facilitating innovative approaches to real time marketing, it has never been more important for marketers to keep their finger on the pulse of these…

“We are, as a species, addicted to story. Even when the body goes to sleep, the minds stays up all night, telling itself stories.” – Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal American author and journalist, Ernest Hemingway once made a $10 bet with some writer friends…

Here at immediate future, we have a mantra that social media is not the be all and end all, but it has fundamentally changed the way we communicate. And having spent some time over the last few months working with a client in the hospitality industry, I think…

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text] Antony Robbins, the Director of Communication at the Museum of London, began his address at our last Social Speakeasy by saying the following: “This evening I’m going to let you in on a little secret, I’m going to tell you an inappropriate story, if you’re good I might…

Holidays: the Holy Grail of the working world. The one time each year where you can kick back in an exotic locale and collect a paycheque for lying in a hammock and reading a dog-eared copy of “Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance”. The importance we place…

One challenge for me day-to-day is helping clients extract the best content possible for their digital activity. When we think about B2B content, we think whitepapers, videos, case studies etc. However, more often than not, the most valuable content is not stored in the form of a document or…

With all kinds of summer events on the agenda and the corporate convention season already rumbling away, marketers are increasingly looking for reliable ways to bide the attention of attendees, eager to solidify connection with their target prospects and make sure they stay on their radar to develop a promising brand…

There might have been a disjoint between Twitter and real life in terms of public opinion around the recent General Election (see last week’s blog), but Twitter offered a fascinating journal of what the politicians were thinking in the final days of the month-long campaign. It was supposed…

Facebook announced the lock-down of its Graph API, to demonstrate the efforts it’s making to protect users’ privacy, and the changes will take effect by 30th April. Wondering what on earth a Facebook’s Graph API is? The Graph API is the primary way to get data in and out of Facebook’s…

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]With Pepsi Max’s new “Genius” campaign officially kicking off this week, the timing of Aman Matharu, Digital Marketing Manager at PepsiCo’s, address at our most recent Social Speakeasy couldn’t have been better. Aman addressed an eager crowd of Social Speakeasy attendees on a balmy spring evening to share the…

Last week, I saw an infographic on the charity and non-profit sectors that perform best – and worst – on social media. And whilst running (and live tweeting!) the London Marathon this year, it occurred to me that charities could be making more of the huge opportunities that…

Recently, I have been working with clients across a wide range of verticals in the B2B space, from pharmaceuticals to chemical engineering to sports equipment. These disparate markets have completely unique business challenges, requirements, sales processes and routes to market. However, there is one thing that many of…

Past UK elections were won by a mix of political manifesto pledges and party leader personalities. But the common platform used to communicate those since the 1950s was television or tabloid newspapers. The Sun newspaper bullishly proclaimed after the 1992 election that “It’s The Sun wot won it”.

It is often assumed that football is the key to targeting the 18-24 year male audience, but data speaks for itself – only 9.9% of the average audience for a Premier League game is in fact aged between the ages of 16 to 24 and male.

Being in the business of social media, we like to believe that it helps bring people together, incites communication and debate amongst large groups of people, and simplifies access to that communication. These remain true, and can be backed up with a plethora of hair-raising facts and figures…

When it comes to customer segmentation, customers tend to be pushed into pre-fabricated segments driven by criteria such as demographic, age, and income. And as we become more sophisticated, transaction details, online usage and CRMs have allowed for more specific segments. Focus groups and surveys provide even more data.

Yes that’s right. There are (unfortunately) far too many senior marketing professionals, even boardroom directors, who are to blame for consumer brands failing on social. Simply put, whoever signs off their approval for junior marketers running social are idiots; whoever hasn’t bothered to understand the critical role social plays…

“Exciting times for live video streaming” isn’t a term we expected to say this side of 2015 but the rate of new apps being introduced that are able to bridge the functionality gap, (Pan Pan, Nutshell, Hopper, Tworlds) has seen a big increase in the last few months. A gap that certain mainstream social…

Your audience on social media can be a fickle, and tricky one to crack. But it’s a quest worth fighting for! Did you know an astonishing 47% of people who follow brands on social are more likely to visit the company’s website? Precisely why it’s…

By adjusting your approach to social media during your businesses peak period, you could turn a stressful and potentially fearful time into a victorious experience delivering spadefuls of ROI. We’ve heard it before: “social can be your best friend or your worst enemy”. This is never truer than during…

Whether you’re at the beginning of your journey working in digital or progressing a career, it seems to me that conventional paths to success are not all that common. In fact, getting on in tech often comes from idiosyncratic and unorthodox approaches. This Sunday, I had the rare and…

A potentially game-changing development from Facebook Ads means that any brand with multiple products to sell can now upload their entire catalogue into the platform, and the automated system will target specific products to those people most likely to buy them across the devices that they use most…

Did anyone hear about Madonna’s fall last week? Well, yes I think the whole world did and they heard about it in the precise moment even if they weren’t watching the Brits. #BRITs2015 anyone? The power of social. By the time the newspapers had printed…

How many social networks do you have a personal account on? Now think about how many you actually use on a regular basis – those two numbers will most likely be different, and from a personal perspective that is not necessarily a negative. Now ask yourself the same…

Most people, when they think of the 1960s, will probably recall the ‘swinging sixties’ or the relaxation of social taboos (clothing, music, drugs, sexuality, formalities and schooling). You may even bring to mind the conflict that raged in Vietnam, the Kennedy assassination or the Apollo 11 mission placing Neil Armstrong…