Nathan Rasdall on Britain's Got Talent

Our son, Nathan, will be performing in ITV's 'Britain's Got Talent' programme on ITV1 tomorrow evening (Saturday 24th April). He is a member of a group called 'The Arrangement' which was formed at Hills Road Sixth Form College, Cambridge.

 

Nathan is playing bass guitar and he has a place at ACM in Guildford in September where he plans to study bass and then pursue a career in music; thankfully he's had his hair cut since this was recorded!

 

Hope you'll tune in and enjoy...
 

Mark Rasdall

 

Fen Creative: Views from Cambridgeshire, in words at http://www.fencreative.co.uk , pictures at http://www.fencreative.shutterchance.com and business at http://www.burweb.co.uk

 

Last post

As a web content consultant, I have set up a new business: Burwell Web Communications (http://www.burweb.co.uk), trading on the internet as burweb. I regularly post stories on items from the advertising, marketing and web sectors there which would previously have appeared on 'The Road to Nowhere' or 'Building Brands'

 

Please switch to my burweb blog (http://burweb.blogspot.com) to continue to receive stories. You can see the feed at http://www.burweb.co.uk/Blog.html where you can also subscribe via RSS or e-mail.
 

Mark Rasdall

 

Fen Creative: Views from Cambridgeshire, in words at http://www.fencreative.co.uk and pictures at http://www.fencreative.shutterchance.com

 

Trends in Television

The IPA's latest Trends in TV report shows a continual growth in digital television channels, which is likely to accelerate further next quarter as the digital switchover takes place in the Granada region.

Woolworths may no longer be wonderful but things are magical at Morrisons

The IPA Effectiveness Awards ceremony took place last night (Monday 9th November) and Morrisons won the Grand Prix, Best Integration (sponsored by Campaign)and Effectiveness Company of the Year (sponsored by thinkbox) awards.

All of the case studies submitted for this year's awards competition are available for download on the main IPA site

Best Practice in Narrative Reporting - new IPA report

The IPA has produced a new report, which is already selling quickly around the world, showing that marketing must do more to promote its contribution to the bottom line in the annual company report.

Best practice in narrative reporting analyses 50 reports from the 2008- 2009 financial year, including the top 10 consumer marketing spenders from the USA, Europe and Asia, as well as a further 20 UK reports, representing top media spenders in the UK. Even though most of the companies state the importance of their brand they fail to provide enough information or analysis on why their brands are successful, highlighting a relatively untapped resource for marketers to show their credentials

Cuts in marketing spend easing

The latest Bellwether survey published by the IPA this week (13th July 2009) has found that for the second quarter in a row the rate of decline in marketing spend has eased, linked to an improvement in business confidence; with companies surveyed reporting that their financial prospects have improved for the first time since the first quarter of last year.

Although the rate of decline remained severe for Q2, raising the risk of marketing spend falling in 2009 even more than in 2008, one-in-three companies reported that their financial prospects had improved compared to one-in-four reporting a deterioration.

You can find further topline details and comment on our Bellwether news story

Everything you needed to know about Rory Sutherland

We've created a hub page on the IPA site for our president, Rory Sutherland. From here you can find links to his tweets, blogs and articles as well as a range of videos and presentations: Rory Sutherland.

We'll be updating this page during the course of his presidency so it's worth bookmarking for future reference.

Creative Opinions

We've been putting together a page on the main IPA site which links back to our members' creative views and opinions and creative inspiration during the last year.

Loading material on IPA website; 'Baby I'm a want you in the background' - what a great song. All you need is Bread

Rankings Pages

The IPA Information Centre has been uploading rankings pages at: http://ping.fm/axUQp

IPA Christmas Vault

We have sent electronic Christmas cards from the IPA in recent years and a collection of online games can now be viewed on our website in a special Christmas Vault.

Recession

We've been putting together some material for IPA members on Advertising in a Recession which have been very popular.

There is also a package of useful material for non-members to show that companies that generally continue with their marketing and advertising plans during recessionary times, do best in terms of market share in the longer-term.

Jobs in Advertising

The IPA Jobs Online service is attracting a lot of traffic on our site and increasing each month. We've had over 11,200 visitors since the site re-launch in May 2008 and IPA Members are using the site extensively.

The new site offers Google Maps and much greater exposure for new advertising jobs around the IPA site

The service is free to IPA members and non-members can pay online to post. according to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, by the end of 2007 corporate websites were more popular than local newspapers in terms of attracting candidates. We hope to keep on developing our service to ensure we are able to capture the very best talent for Adland and also provide even greater value for money for our members.

Diagonal Thinking

We've recently launched an online self-test under the umbrella of Diagonal Thinking.

The central hypothesis of Diagonal Thinking is the ability of successful people in advertising and marketing communications to think outstandingly well in both linear/inductive and lateral/creative ways.

Many people have taken the test and we hope it will encourage a greater diversity of applications from those seeking to get into IPA member agencies.

Brand Immortality

We've been preparing materials for the forthcoming launch of the book: Brand Immortality.

Written by Hamish Pringle, Director Genteral of the IPA, and Peter Field, the book explores the proposition that, properly managed, no brand need decay and die - immortality is within the reach of all. If the right decisions, the right resources and the right imagination are brought to bear, brands can renew continuously and outlive their creators.

Links to IPA Agency Profile

We've been working with Senior Internet on some key SEO phrases that we never quite cracked on the old site.

I'm pleased to say that, on Google, 'best advertising agency' and 'top advertising agencies' both come top of the listings and both link through to the main IPA Agency PROFILEpage on our site.

We hope that this will put IPA agencies in front of an even greater external audience, especially as IPA membership represents such a quality standard in the UK advertising agency business.

IPA Effectiveness

We launched our new Effectiveness Awards site last Thursday. It showcases entries to the competition since 1980 and also the shortlist for the 2008 winners.

It is our first site to launch which uses the same Content Management System (CMS) as the main IPA site and much of the content is shared, especially video content which can be found on the main site in the Video Vault

Link to us

We've been working very hard since the launch of the new IPA website to increase links to our site.

We already enjoy a high number of backlinks and currently have a Google PageRank of 6, which we're seeking to improve. As part of our strategy, we've added a Link To Us page on the site where webmasters can easily pick up code to link to the Home, TouchPoints, Advertising Agency list (PROFILE), Jobs in advertising, Careers in advertising and Advertising News pages.

IPA TouchPoints2

We launched our latest TouchPoints Hub Survey yesterday (3rd July 2008). TouchPoints media research gives communication strategists a consumer-centric planning tool which looks at how people consume disparate media according to their particular lifestyles.

The latest survey shows a slice of the GB adult population in late 2007 and early 2008 and throws up stats such as:

• Penetration of the internet now stands at 73% of all adults, compared to 58% for the previous TouchPoints Survey



• 15% of all adults write their own blogs



• 45% of adults think that their journeys are getting longer

The main IPA TouchPoints Homepage can be found at:

TouchPoints2

New IPA site goes live

Our new site at www.ipa.co.uk went live during the last 24 hours. We've been developing it for the past fifteen months and had a Beta site for the last three.

Early feedback is very positive and we are certainly seeing a lot of registrations from members, registered or standard users (non-members) and students. We'll be monitoring the registration process carefully and then move on to the analytics reports to show us where people are going once they've accessed the site.

I'm changing previous posts to reflect links to the new site.

Hot Topics

The IPA has a series of e-newsletters, targeted at our three principal audiences of individuals in member agencies (Adnews), non-members (Adland) and students (Adstudent). If anyone would like to subscribe to these they can contact Louise Rome at the IPA.

Adnews and Adland go out fortnightly and Adstudent at least twice a year. The newsletters include key news content, training course and event information and latest jobs from our IPA Jobs Online service.

There are also feature sections including Hot Topics where opinion pieces are written on current issues by key industry individuals. As part of the crossover with the new website, these are also featured on the site and relationships created with other relevant website content.

If you go to the IPA site and search for "Hot Topics" you'll be able to navigate through to that content.

Yahoo! Pipes

We originally used a service on our IPA site from Fwicki to mash up RSS feeds for news and blogs but are now trialing a similar feed service from Yahoo! Pipes.

We have built an industry news and search mashup page and would welcome feedback to mark@ipa.co.uk.

Does anyone have experience of using either feeds service and advantages or otherwise of either?

New IPA BETA site

We opened up the latest version of our new BETA site to the outside world last week. We have set up IPA staff to go in and test and welcome feedback from any individual from our key audiences of members, non-members and students. all you need to do is set up an account and login.

We've had a BETA version of the site since June of last year and have been adding content and testing since then. This release marks the latest version of the new site and, assuming testing and usability feedback is positive, we'll be looking to go live very soon.

If anyone wants to send any feedback, please mail me on mark@ipa.co.uk

IPA and Advertising News search

IPA News

Go to the IPA site for news and content updates by clicking here

RSS News Feed from the IPA

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Advertising News - mashup from Fwicki

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