Posts made in January, 2016

on Jan 29, 2016

By Tony Connelly The Herald has come under severe criticism for failing to defend two under fire journalists who reported on matters relating to sectarian chanting at Rangers football club. Sunday Herald columnist and former The Drum reporter, Angela Haggerty, was sacked after showing her support for colleague and sports reporter, Graham Spiers, who departed following pressure for a column he wrote in which he questioned “the mettle” of the current Ranger’s board in tackling offensive chanting. The Ranger’s supporters trust threatened the Newsquest title with legal action over Spiers’ assertion that an un-named Rangers director told him that he thought The Billy Boys was Read full story › Source: The Drum...

on Jan 29, 2016

By Seb Joseph There’s a growing urgency among food and drink makers to make healthier eating desirable now that it’s getting harder to convince people to consume sugary products and the threat of legislation looms. The prospect of a sugar tax in the UK has sparked debate among brands, politicians and consumers over who and what is needed to tackle the country’s obesity crisis. It has been estimated a 20 per cent sugar tax could raise up to a £1bn a year as part of a government-led overhaul that would also ban the advertising of sugary products to kids and stop 2-for-1 promotions on Read full story › Source: The Drum...

on Jan 29, 2016

By Jason Hemingway BT’s acquisition of EE won’t present a risk to the telecoms industry – according to the Competition and Markets Authority – but the £12.5bn merger of the UK’s largest fixed telecoms business and largest mobile telecoms business will dramatically alter the communications landscape. Completed today, the merger comes at a time when customer expectations of the telecoms industry are high, and satisfaction is low. Complaints to the ombudsman about communication providers increased 35 per cent over the last three years, and Thunderhead-commissioned research shows nearly a fifth (17 per cent) of telecoms customers feel a single Read full story › Source: The Drum...

on Jan 29, 2016

By Ronan Shields Formerly the domain of a brand’s chief information officer, IT budgets are are increasingly controlled by chief marketers, a change ushered in by the ‘big data’ era where data management platforms (DMPs) are seen as key to operating a marketing department fit for purpose in contemporary practice. A recent study from ExchangeWire Research, an outfit that examines the effect of the changing role of both martech and programmatic media buying technologies, found that DMP investment reached a tipping point in 2015 among both brands and marketers. Generic awareness of DMPs is high because they represent a unifying technology across the media industry Read full story › Source: The Drum...

on Jan 29, 2016

By Michael Feeley In a rejection of the ‘360 degree’ marketing agency model, RedPill has achieved 40 per cent year-on-year growth since its inception by focusing exclusively on the production and distribution of social video… “When we started out, 30 hours of video were being uploaded to YouTube every minute,” says Liam Corrigan, creative director of RedPill, as he explains why, when he co-founded the agency in 2009, the strategy was to focus exclusively on social video. “Today, it’s more than 300 hours per minute and growing. We always wanted to be a new breed of agency, taking a human approach to creating and seeding Read full story › Source: The Drum...