Tension over a football club rebrand, a “How-to-do-Facebook”
lesson for big corporates, healthy eating with McDonald’s, Irish people asking
Google what love is - and the ongoing digital/print challenges for news media
companies – my favourite marketing stories of the past week!
Tigers
V City
Showing the importance of including all target audiences
in your plans and what happens when you don’t – the Irish Independent tells us
that Hull City owner, Assem Allam faces a revolt from fans as he wants to
rebrand the team as the Hull Tigers.
Interesting to see whether Heritage or the more American-sounding Tigers
will win out!
Furry
impressive!
Anyone who uses Facebook can’t fail to see the
predominance of cats on the platform but the web has more than proved itself as
animal-friendly in a lovely article from Karlin Lillington in last Thursday’s
Irish Times. She tells us that the web has transformed the fortunes of animal
welfare and rescue groups. The work by
Animal Heaven Animal Rescue (AHAR) in Kerry is cited by Karlin as showing big
corporates how to use Facebook.
Nice
contract for Flahavans
Having worked on the PR for McDonald’s Restaurants of
Ireland when they introduced their salads some years back, I was really interested
to see that they have done a deal with Flahavans – McDonald’s already sells
100,000 portions of porridge each year in Ireland they say and they want to
raise that to 250,000 – so a positive and healthy news story all round.
Irish looking for
love!
Adworld tells us that Irish people apparently are
asking Google ‘what is love?’ according to a Google report, issued to celebrate
10 years in Ireland, which itemised the most popular search terms in Ireland in
the past year. But Adworld also tells us
that Kantar Media ROI reveals some very interesting search facts – while 73% of
Irish adults use Google for search, age plays a big role in which search engine
is used. Irish 20-24 year old adults are
two and a half times more likely to use About.com while 25-34 year olds are 67%
more likely than the average to use Yahoo UK and Ireland.
To paywall or not to
paywall
Meanwhile the UK Independent in its Media column last
week covered the issue of how news media companies have been and continue to be
excited by the potential of tablets vis-à-vis paywalls. Interestingly one company claims that most
tablet usage is mainly in the evenings – that users don’t carry their tablets
with them during the day. Not true in
Dublin anyway! If it were true, a media
buying company claims that day’s news app is out of date by the evening and so
the news media companies need to produce ‘second screen’ content i.e. content
that will be viewed while people do other things such as watching TV etc.
Times
Tablet Offering to replace ePaper
Laura Slattery reported in the Irish Times last Friday,
25th October, that the paper is introducing a new tablet offering
instead of its existing ePaper. In the
face of declining advertising revenue and declining circulation, the company
continues to investigate digital options.
MD Liam Kavanagh said that there is just too much free media and that
it’s unsustainable in the current climate.
