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MWW, Makovsky, Others Have “Oscar Moments” – Stevie Awards Founder Gallagher Shines Spotlight on PR, Marketing
Brian Pittman’s exclusive interview with Michael Gallagher, Founder, Stevie Awards, American Business Awards
PR and marketing professionals grabbed their fair share of the spotlight this past week – thanks in no small part to a former marketing exec whose mission since leaving the profession has been to give business professionals of all stripes a shot at their own “Oscar moment.” Shining a spotlight on the best and brightest execs, organizations and employees in America, The 10th Annual American Business Awards announced Stevie® Award Winners last week at the first of two gala award ceremonies taking place this year.
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Controversial Ads and Social Media-Are You So Excited You Could Pee?
Social Media Zone…By Vicki @Smartwoman Flaugher
Ads, and industry stories about ads, catch my eye often. That’s the point, right? This story especially made me do a double take, especially when they mentioned social media. Here’s the set up: The Los Angeles Times story was about the British luxury store Harvey Nichols. HN ran controversial ads with models apparently having pee’d themselves over the fantastic sale prices going on at the store. The tag line is “The Harvey Nichols sale: Try to contain your excitement.”
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Media Relations: Does It Have to Be a Battle?
IR Therefore I Am… By Gene Marbach
A colleague recently forwarded a listing to me entitled, “The 25 Most Dangerous People in Financial Media,” which was authored by Joshua M. Brown of Backstage Wall Street. In Mr. Brown’s words: “Dangerous in a good way – these are the financial media players who are making things very difficult for the establishment to maintain the status quo.”
Many executives today fear what has been termed “gotcha journalism…”
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YouTube Optimization Series: Part 1- Content Gap Analysis
By ZOG Digital for the Digital Visibility Channel
When marketers think about YouTube, many don’t realize that aside from Google search, YouTube is the worlds largest search engine. With over 60 hours of content uploaded every minute, and over 4 billion videos viewed per day (Source: YouTube), it is clear that ensuring your content is visible is an enormous undertaking many marketers inadequately address by “hoping” their video goes viral. To help in this regard, we will be embarking on the first part of a five part series designed to show you how to more systematically optimize your videos for maximum YouTube popularity and visibility:
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PR Measurement News: And Now It’s the Dublin Declaration
By Derek Tronsgard, Director of International Accounts, PRIME Research, for the PR ROI Channel
At the fourth in a series of conferences held by Association for Measurement and Evaluation of communication (AMEC) following Barcelona, Lisbon and Hong Kong, the major theme at the Dublin conference was the continued push for measurement standards as outlined in the Barcelona Principles. An equally important topic was the need for more education about truly valid metrics, not only at the client level, but also at the agency and practitioner level.
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U.S. PR Firms` Profitability Rebounds to Pre-Recession Levels
The Holmes Report
US public relations agency profitability has rebounded from a 2009 four-year low of 13.5 percent of revenues to 18.6 percent, according to an annual benchmarking survey conducted by consulting firm StevensGouldPincus. That means PR firms profits in the US are almost back to their pre-recession levels.
A total of 105 agencies based coast to coast and Canada reported 18.6 percent average profitability, compared with a 15.6 percent in 2010, 13.5 percent in 2009, 15.6 percent in 2008 and a 19.7 percent margin in pre-recession 2007, according to Rick Gould, managing partner of the New York-based merger and management consulting firm.
Firms under $3 million in revenues were the most profitable, at 20.5 percent. Firms with revenues of between $3 million and $10 million netted 17.4 percent, those between $10 million and $25 million netted 16.8 percent and those in excess of $25 million netted 19.2 percent, respectable in challenging economic times. All four categories improved from the previous year …
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Sassy PR: CBS PR Team Issues Mock Press Release, Turns Heads
Seattle Post Intelligencer
After a judge denied CBS’ request to prevent the airing of ABC’s new reality program The Glass House — which CBS believes to be a direct rip-off of its long-running hit Big Brother — the network fired back Wednesday with a mock press release announcing the development of a new show called Dancing on the Stars, a blatant play on ABC’s hit competition series Dancing with the Stars. Some think CBS went too far with the release, but general consensus is that the sassy, satirical PR play was both inbounds and effective. CBS certainly is not hiding from coverage about the release …
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Mobile Marketing: Apple`s iCloud Goes Dark on Same Day Microsoft Launches Biggest iPhone Threat
Mobile Marketing Watch
On Wednesday, news quickly circulated that Apple`s iCloud service had gone dark. This came on the same day that Microsoft announced and previewed what is being widely dubbed the first real “iPhone killer.”
The reports of the outage, however, were soon dismissed by some for whom iCloud was still functional. It now turns out that the outage did not impact all users.
Apple has now confirmed the outage although the company is yet to delve into what exactly happened or how many users were effected.
“Users may have been unable to access iCloud services,” the Apple iCloud support page reads. “Normal service has been restored.” …
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Study Shows US Falls Short In Responses to Social Media Fan Feedback
Marketing Pilgrim
A new report from Socialbakers shows that most companies are missing out on this golden opportunity to engage their customers. And here in the U.S., we`re really blowing it big time. Socialbakers used their Socially Devoted program to look at social media response time. What they found was that “on average, companies respond to only 30 percent of social media fans` feedback.” The average response time, 26 hours.
Looking at the companies that are getting it right, most are in telecommunications, mobile, finance and airlines industries and they`re based outside of the U.S. On the other hand, 25% of global companies didn`t allow any kind of interaction on their Facebook Page. Socialbakers says Walmart, Subway, Disneyland and Target have the most popular Facebook Pages. Target is the fastest growing page …
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Road Show Changes Coming? Facebook IPO Prompts Capitol Hill Inquiry
MarketWatch
In the wake of concerns about a lack of disclosure in Facebook`s controversial IPO last month, regulatory observers urged policy makers on Wednesday to require companies to make road-show discussions available to the broader public.
“It is very important that we try to give everyone the same information,” said Ann Sherman, associate professor of finance at DePaul University, at a Senate Banking Committee hearing devoted to whether the IPO process was working for ordinary investors. “I think the question-and-answer part of the road show should be available even to retail investors.” Lise Buyer, founder of Class V Group LLC, a firm that guides IPO-bound companies, agreed with Sherman and said that one way to improve the flow of information would be to require companies on a road show to offer a scheduled “ask the management” online Q&A session …
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SEC Chief Accountant to Leave
The Wall Street Journal
SEC Chief Accountant James L. Kroeker will leave the SEC in July for a job in the private sector, the SEC said Wednesday.
Mr. Kroeker, a former Deloitte & Touche LLP partner, has served as the SEC`s chief accountant since January 2009. He joined the SEC in 2007 as deputy chief accountant.
At the agency, Mr. Kroeker focused on the convergence of U.S. and international accounting standards and efforts to improve off-balance sheet accounting standards, the SEC said.
He did not immediately respond to questions about his new assignment …
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NFL Issues PR Kudos: Texans` In-House Communications Team Wins Award
ESPN
The Houston Texans have won the Pete Rozelle Award for the best media relations department in the NFL. Houston won the award from the Professional Football Writers of America for the third time in six years and fourth since 2004.
The staff is led by Kevin Cooper, and includes Evan Koch, Zac Emmons, Charles Hampton and Brett Maikowski. Cooper has been on the staff for all four Rozelle Awards, but this is his first as senior director of communications for the team.
The award is named for former NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle, who worked in media relations for the Los Angeles Rams from 1952-55 before running the league from 1960-1989 …
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PR Pros on the Go: Current TV Names Oxygen Media Vet Sinha Director of Communications
TV News Check
Current TV has appointed Ashok Sinha vice president of corporate communications, charged with helping expand the network`s publicity efforts “across multiple media platforms.” At Current, he will lead publicity for programming including Viewpoint with Eliot Spitzer, The Bill Press Show and the recently announced The Joy Behar Show, which will premiere this fall. Sinha will report to Laura Nelson, SVP of corporate communications.
Sinha most recently was director of communications at Oxygen Media. Prior to Oxygen, Sinha was chief of staff for Product (RED), where he directed communications activity for the office of the CEO which included managing speaking engagements and presentations, and also served as liaison to external organizations including The Global Fund to Fight Tuberculosis, Malaria and AIDS and the United Nations Foundation …
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Barclaycard: Facebook Ads Outperformed Display, Search by 163%
ADWEEK
Barclaycard launched a sweeping campaign last November to promote its NFL Extra Points card. The digital media buy included search and display ads on more than a dozen digital media platforms, but the financial services company`s Facebook ads outperformed them all, generating a 0.13 percent clickthrough rate versus the overall campaign`s average of 0.08 percent.
Facebook was “our top performing digital channel,” said David Goodman, senior director of digital marketing for Barclaycard U.S. Not only did the Facebook ads generate a 40 percent higher conversion rate compared to the campaign`s other digital channels, but it did so at a 48 percent lower cost-per-acquisition. In total, the Facebook ads sent Barclaycard 2,300 preapproved accounts and 60 percent of the campaign`s total approvals …
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WPP Acquires AKQA to Beef Up Digital Marketing
New York Times
WPP Group, the world`s largest advertising company, escalated the industry`s digital arms race on Wednesday, saying it had reached an agreement to buy AKQA, one of the biggest independent agencies specializing in new forms of marketing. Exact financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but WPP said the agreement valued the privately held company at about $540 million, making it one of the largest acquisitions of a digital ad agency.
Led by WPP, based in Dublin, and Publicis Groupe, based in Paris, the big advertising companies have been building up their digital arsenals as marketers shift spending from traditional media to the Internet, mobile applications and other digital formats …
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