Posts made in July, 2015

on Jul 28, 2015

By Jennifer Faull According to Kantar Worldpanel’s latest grocery share figures, published today for the 12 weeks ending 19 July 2015, Pick Your Own Offers has accelerated growth at Waitrose by 3.0 per cent. Its market share has consequently benefitted, rising to 5.0 per cent, an increase of 0.1 percentage points compared with last year. Pick Your Own Offers was hailed a game-changing alternative to the mass discounting employed by the Big Four supermarkets when it launched at the start of June. The strategy used by Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury’s et al recently came under fire from the Competition and Markets Authority, claiming they all use Read full story › Source: The Drum...

on Jul 28, 2015

By Stephen Kenwright Google announced last week that it would be is shuttering unclaimed Google+ Local pages – part of a “decoupling” project to salvage the still moving parts of Plus from an engine that has otherwise ground to a standstill. Links to Plus from within Google products disappeared last month. For those still using Plus the link was still available in the grid menu – the place where Google experiments go to die – but since June it has been impossible to access Plus from Maps and the local search features of Plus have been disabled. Already rechristened Google My Business, local no Read full story › Source: The Drum...

on Jul 28, 2015

By Thomas Hobbs Crozier said the fall in viewing figures had not impacted ITV’s commercial performance, with total revenues rising across the business by 11% year on year to £1.36bn. He said ad revenues were up 11.5% in the first quarter and down 0.5% in the second quarter. The latter was driven by declines in ‘Entertainment & Leisure’ ad spend as brands spent less following major investment during the Football World Cup last year. Crozier predicted that ad sales would be up by 8% over the third quarter and total advertising growth would accelerate to 6% for the nine months to September. Advertiser’s “ability to reach Read full story › Source: Marketing Week...

on Jul 28, 2015

By Paul Bennun Amara’s Law says, “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” It’s true – and it’s becoming a huge issue for brands who aren’t in full control of their complete hardware/software stack, which, in practical terms, means those brands not called ‘Apple’ or ‘Google’. Grey-hairs will remember how the earth shook at the birth of the mobile internet, around the turn of the millennium. If you had any vision, you were convinced the text interface of WAP, brought to you at a crazy-fast 10 kilobits per second, would change Read full story › Source: The Drum...

on Jul 28, 2015

By John Glenday Royal Mail has been slapped across the wrist by communications regulator Ofcom for a series of abortive price hikes for bulk mail delivery customers, now deemed to be in breach of competition law. First announced in January 2014, the plans were subsequently withdrawn following protests from rival delivery services such as Whistl, which claimed the move was uncompetitive as they would see customers using third party services charged more. Much bulk mail is currently collected by private postal firms direct from businesses before being passed to the Royal Mail for sorting and delivery. In its adjudication Ofcom said: “Changes to Royal Mail’s wholesale Read full story › Source: The Drum...