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Branding Champions: P&G’s Winning Sponsorship of the 2012 Olympic Games
Olympics… By Michelle Adelson, Chief Brand Officer, The Phelps Group
Corporations invest millions of marketing dollars in sponsorships in an effort to impact awareness and brand perception. A prime example is how brands hope to win glory and consumer affinity with the Olympic Games. However, to drive maximum return for such sponsorships, companies must connect their brand to the sponsorship in a relevant and meaningful way. So how exactly do you do that? Proctor and Gamble’s sponsorship of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games highlights the best practices of integrating a brand with a sponsorship partner.
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5 Tips to Bring Magic to Your Social: Walt Disney World Culture and How You Can Copy It
Social Media Zone… By Vicki Flaugher, a.k.a. @smartwoman
I visited with Mickey and friends this week and I loved, loved, loved it! I was awe-struck at the way the Disney culture permeates everything that you see in the parks. We visited Animal Kingdom, Magic Kingdom, and Epcot and each park had its own unique features. I was inspired to talk about brand culture today from my experience. Magical Tip #1 – Live It, Breathe It, Be It… When we spoke with cast members (no one is an “employee”), they all said the same thing – they live in a Disney bubble. They work together, play together, often living in apartments together.
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Blogs and Brands: Four Common Mistakes PR Pros Make in Blogger Outreach – and How to Fix Them
Marketing… By Hugh Anderson, Forth Metrics Limited
If done right, building relationships with influential bloggers can be immensely valuable as it can create brand advocates and build a real community around your brand or product. But it’s not a quick win. It requires time, effort and patience. And it requires different skills and methodologies to traditional media PR. So what are some of the biggest pitfalls that traditional PR pros make when commencing blogger outreach? Here’s a look at four of the most common:
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The Evolution of Corporate Social Responsibility Report: Shifting from PR to IR
Champions of IMC… Free Event Hosted by Joe Sibilia, CEO, CSRwire
The Corporate Social Responsibility Report has advanced beyond the purely Public Relations play to enter the field of attention of Investor Relations. Transparency is the new currency. Recent studies indicate that Voluntary Disclosure has an impact on share price. And, it’s not what you think. The most successful companies prepare the release of their CSR/Sustainability report well in advance of the release with a variety of interesting components of the report. This is followed by the release of the report, followed by a webinar describing the contents of the report in an interactive engaged environment.
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Five Marketing Takeaways from London 2012′s YouTube
By Steven Shattuck for Latergy and the Social Video Channel
While millions of Americans watch the games of the 30th Olympiad unfold live on tape-delay, the London 2012 host committee is maintaining a dynamic YouTube Channel with content that you won’t find anywhere else. While the channel itself isn’t a flawless example of how to use to the medium, there are a few things that businesses and organizations of all sizes can takeaway (besides the typical advice of transcribing, filling out titles, descriptions and keywords, etc.) to improve their own YouTube presence and video marketing strategy.
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Ritz-Carlton: Can Skills-Based Volunteering Help End the Dropout Crisis?
By Sue Stephenson, VP, Community Footprints, The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company for CSRwire and the Corporate Social Responsibility Channel
One in four public school children drop out before they finish high school. For African-American and Hispanic students, the likelihood of graduating is closer to 50 percent. Many of these students don’t have access to positive role models, cannot envision a career, and don’t feel connected to their communities. Tragically, young people who drop out are much more likely to be unemployed, incarcerated or live in poverty.
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Email Marketing Tip #10: Stick to a Schedule
By WhatCounts for the Effective Email Marketing Channel
Whether you send your emails daily, weekly, or monthly, make sure you stick to that schedule. This will allow your subscribers to know exactly when to expect your email, and they will look forward to it! When planning your email marketing campaigns, it’s important to map out a plan. Devise a schedule to help you reach your subscribers with the right information at the right time. Decide what types of emails will be sent when and at what frequency. Stay a step ahead of the game by creating an effective and reusable email template.
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U.K. PR Exec. to Lead IABC in U.S.; PR Is Timid in Both
O’Dwyer’s
Chris Sorek, who graduated from Michigan State and worked for Ogilvy & Mather in Taiwan and Singapore and Cohn & Wolfe in New York, and who has spent the last 11 years in PR jobs in the U.K. and Switzerland, has joined the Int’l Assn. of Business Communicators as executive director. Sorek will find that the PR community in the U.S. is pretty much like that in the U.K. – frightened of traditional media and confused about the role of social media and how to use the technological advances available to communicators. “Clients … are too scared to say anything” that might get picked up by the media, Richard Moss, director of the U.K.’s Good Relations, told prmoment.com. Content has become “too vanilla to matter,” he added. Daney Parker, who authored the U.K. blog post, quotes Henry Griffiths of Little Red Rooster as urging PR people to set up face-to-face meetings with reporters, who complain they are seeing less and less of PR staffers …
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PR Kingpin Harris Diamond Pays $6.5 M. for Fifth Avenue Pad
CommPRO.biz
The New York Observer ran this little blurb on a recent real estate pickup by respected PR veteran and luminary, Harris Diamond. While the news is hardly, well, “news,” perhaps the transaction suggests that PR bellweather Weber Shandwick is doing quite nicely, thank you. We can only hope so: “What’s the most flattering way to say that one of the masters of spin has purchased a pricey pad on the Upper East Side? Let’s contemplate the ledes. Harris Diamond has made a generous contribution to the estate of Goodwin M. Breinin? Mr. Diamond and wife Amy have invested in New York real estate, thus helping the market to reach even greater heights? Mr. and Ms. Diamond are happy to expand their New York presence with a new apartment on the Upper East Side? In any event, here’s the actual piece of news – not buried, for once, in heaps of self-congratulatory prose – Ms. and Mr. Diamond, who is the CEO of P.R. mega-firm Weber Shandwick Worldwide, have paid $6.5 million for a three-bedroom co-op at 912 Fifth Avenue, according to city records.” …
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Firm Ditches Facebook for Twitter, Claims Clicks Are Bots
CNET
Limited Run alleges 80 percent of clicks were coming from bots, and Facebook would only let the company change its name if it agreed to spend $2,000 or more in advertising a month. While testing Facebook’s advertising system, Limited Run noticed it could only verify about 20 percent of the clicks that were supposedly being converted to users showing up on its Web site. After trying a few analytics services to figure out the remaining traffic, the company built its own software out of exasperation. It turned out the bulk of users had JavaScript disabled, making it difficult to track their clicks. So the company built a page logger, and allegedly found 80 percent of clicks it was paying for were coming from bots …
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CMO Out: Controversial Manchester United Deal Led to GM CMO’s Ouster
CNN Money
A marketing tie-up between General Motors Co.’s Chevrolet brand and the Manchester United soccer club led to the ouster of Joel Ewanick, GM’s global marketing chief. A source who declined to be named citing the legalities of Ewanick’s abrupt departure, said GM (GM) senior management had identified “improprieties” in connection with the Manchester United deal announced in late May. The source declined to discuss nature of the impropriety. A GM spokesman, Greg Martin, said Ewanick’s job performance hadn’t met the company’s expectations. Ewanick resigned on Sunday. He declined to comment. Ewanick’s sudden departure is a stunning reversal of fortune for a quickly rising executive given a mandate to shake up a stodgy giant. For the time being, the sales and marketing executives for GM’s vehicle lines will pick up the slack left with the exit of Ewanick, 52. Alan Batey, 49, U.S. sales and service chief will also assume Ewanick’s duties on an interim basis …
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10 Years Later: Sarbanes-Oxley Act Continues to Shape Board Governance
PR Newswire
Ten years after the Sarbanes-Oxley Act ushered in a new era of corporate governance, U.S. public company boards today are more independent from management, more financially savvy and more diverse. Signed into law on July 29, 2002, Sarbox was intended to improve the audit process and internal controls, increase board independence from management, and improve disclosure and transparency. Although Sarbanes-Oxley did not expressly address board composition, increasing the independence of public company boards was a primary objective of the legislation. Listing requirements established by the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ at the time established definitions for independent directors and required that independent directors make up a majority of a listed company’s board of directors. The percentage of independent directors on S&P 500 boards has increased from 79 percent in 2002 to 84 percent in 2012. In 2002, the CEO was the only non-independent director on 31 percent of S&P 500 boards compared with 59 percent of boards today. …
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Annual Sutherland SEC/FINRA Litigation Study: Taking on Regulators Proves Beneficial
MarketWatch
Sutherland Asbill & Brennan announced the results of its 2012 Sutherland SEC/FINRA Litigation Study – an annual review of the litigated cases brought by the SEC and FINRA against broker-dealers and associated persons. This year, the study found that while most firms and individuals choose to settle, litigation is often a wiser choice. The attorneys analyzed cases in Fiscal Year (FY) 2011 and the first half of FY 2012 (October 2010 through March 2012) and found that: 15% of all litigated SEC and FINRA charges were dismissed. When represented by counsel, FINRA respondents were successful almost 20% of the time. Nearly 1/3 of the time, the administrative law judge (ALJ) or the Hearing Panel imposed lower monetary sanctions than the SEC or FINRA prosecutors sought. In FINRA hearings, 50% of the time Hearing Panels imposed shorter suspensions and 33% of the time Hearing Panels imposed lower monetary sanctions than those sought by FINRA staff. …
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Digital First Media Names Jonathan Cooper VP Media Relations and Employee Communications
MarketWatch
Digital First Media, which operates MediaNews Group and Journal Register Company, today named Jonathan Cooper as Vice President Media Relations and Employee Communications. Mr. Cooper, 38, most recently served as Vice President of Digital First Media during the Company’s inception. He previously served as Vice President of Content for Journal Register Company where he led the Company’s digital cultural transformation through the Ben Franklin Project, a unique open-source publishing experiment where Journal Register used free and low-cost digital tools to publish 18 daily newspapers and websites …
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Reporter Rips Chick-fil-A’s PR Even after Company’s PR Director Dies amid Same-Sex Controversy
CBS
Interesting that this piece ran on CBS yesterday–after Chick-fil-A’s PR VP passed away unexpectedly on Friday. In this case, the lead should have been the passing: “It must be tough working in media relations these days. If there’s any doubt, just ask Chick-fil-A’s public relations department, reeling from what just might be the most embarrassing social media fiasco of 2012. There was a time when PR pros could control their company’s message simply by sticking to talking points and carefully scripted statements. It all went one way, from the corporate communication office to the consumer via billboards, TV commercials, magazines, and newspapers. But these days, largely thanks to Facebook and Twitter, communication in the corporate world goes in three directions: Company-to-consumer, consumer-to-company, and consumer-to-consumer. It’s that last axis of communication that seems to have bitten Chick-fil-A in the thigh …
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Half of Digital Video Ads To Be Interactive In Two Years
Mediapost
Most digital video ad inventory today is not interactive, but that could change within two years when potentially half may be interactive, says Peter Minnium, head of brand initiatives at the Interactive Advertising Bureau. Minnium leads the IAB’s Rising Stars initiative for video, so he’s got a stake and an interest in this transition to interactivity. Even so, there’s reason to be hopeful that interactivity could become more widespread in video. The IAB has already seen at least 50 submissions for its Rising Stars video competition from technology vendors for digital video ad formats that include interactive features. That’s a large number of entries, given the number of vendors playing in this area. The purpose of the Rising Stars effort is to foster creativity and help publishers and vendors more broadly adopt next-generation ad formats. “I estimate that well over 90% of digital video advertising is linear and non-interactive and that’s a huge problem because it’s just repurposed TV advertising then,” he said …
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What Earnings Reports Have Revealed About Ads
CBS
Here are highlights from selected Internet and media companies and what they say about the state of spending on advertising: Gannett Co. says advertising demand was “uneven” and “choppy.” Ad revenue at Gannett’s newspaper publishing segment fell 8 percent to $594 million. Broadcasting revenue climbed 11 percent to $205 million, helped by stronger political and auto-related TV advertising, as well as growth at Gannett’s Captivate business, which shows ads in elevators. The company expects the Olympics and political spending to bolster results in the second half of the year. Yahoo Inc. says revenue for the latest quarter dipped 1 percent to $1.22 billion. After taking out ad commissions, Yahoo’s net revenue totaled $1.08 billion. That figure fell about $16 million below analyst estimates. Omnicom Group says its U.S. business helped lift second-quarter net income 1.5 percent, making up for a decline overseas. Domestic revenue grew 5.4 percent, while international revenue fell 1.3 percent. Google’s earnings hit analysts’ target as refinements to the company’s Internet search technology lured more Web surfers to click on its revenue-producing ads …
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