Update, Expansion and New Clients

Okay it’s been a while so I thought an update was due.

Over the last few months we have been working with a number of clients from the UK, USA and South Korea helping them with their strategy and how to engage their consumers in a digital world.

In addition to this we have also been doing a huge amount of ‘housework’ to help us with the expansion of Bletchley Group over the coming months. We have launched a new website at http://www.bletchleygroup.com but are working on a update to the content to better reflect what we do and the services we offer clients going forward.

We have finally found our PR team although this took us significantly longer than we hoped or expected but we pride ourselves on giving a first class service and so it was vitally important that we have the correct team in place to achieve this. I’m glad to say we now have this in place. Look out for some press releases in the near future.

Also I’m extremely please to say that News International specifically The Sunday Times are now a client.

Unfortunately I can’t mention the project just yet but we are working to help them launch a new initiative. Our remit is very wide ranging, we are currently preparing a full scoping document including; the proposition, positioning, the brand, the supply chain, fulfilment partners, e-commerce, legal and finance. It’s a brilliant project and will be an excellant case study to show our full range of services, once we can tell everyone about it.

Bacardi unwrap the bacardi.com portal

It was nice to see that Bacardi have officially unwrapped the bacardi.com portal. Congratulations for a fantastic site.

Two years ago we developed a strategy and solution to help Bacardi address their business needs.  

Bacardi globally had over 50 local websites each with their own look and feel creating an inconsistent message to consumers throughout the world.  To address this our solution included a portal which would allow a globally consistent look and feel which can be controlled by the Global Brand Team centrally.

The Local Marketing Teams however wished to have control over the campaigns which they ran and needed a quick way to maintain this promotional activity carried out in their own market.  To accommodate this, our solution allowed for each local market to have access to a number of locally based micro-sites which met the portal standards we prepared and so fitted into the global portal.

In addition to these two key elements of our solution there were numerous other technology advances which met the marketing and business needs including deep linking of domain names so that http://www.bacardi.com/uk/blive/competition would take a consumer directly to the UK B-Live competitions page without the need to navigate there from the home page, making the consumer experience so much easier and getting consumers directly to the content they are interested in.

We planned the global implementation and managed the implementation of this portal and the launch of the UK and USA micro-sites in May and June 2007.

Our solution met and still meets all the requirements of Bacardi Global Brands and the Local Marketing companies to provide an incredibly flexible, globally consistent brand experience to their consumers throughout the world. 

Speaking at ad:tech London

Our Managing Director and Principal Consultant, Jim Stevenson, has been invited to speak at ad:tech London – The UK’s Premier Interactive Marketing Event.

Jim will be discussing Digital Amplification of Experiential Marketing along with Marcel Engh, Vice President, Brand Entertainment, SONY BMG Europe, Jean-Paul Edwards, Head of Media Futures, MG OMD and David Day, CEO, Europe, Lightspeed Research.

The conference is on Wednesday and Thursday 26th and 27th of September at the Olympia 2, Hammersmith Road, London W14 8UX. Here is some useful information.

Hope to see you there.

DEWARS Website Launched in Mandarin

We have launched the DEWARS website in Mandarin to target the growing markets of the Far East and specifically China.

Users who select China as their country of origin will be presented with the site in Mandarin.

This means the website is now available in English, Spanish and Mandarin – all the languages of the core markets for Whisky -, yet again playing to the Strategy we prepared for making the site easy to find and use for consumers.

Marketing Magazine’s Seamless Customer Journey For A Sticky, Winning Website Conference.

Our Managing Director and Principal Consultant, Jim Stevenson, has been invited to Chair the Marketing Magazine’s One-Day Conference, Seamless Customer Journey For A Sticky, Winning Website. The objective of the conference is to “ensure a smooth, user-friendly and seamless customer journey for a sticky, winning website”

In addition to chairing this conference, he is also presenting ‘Optimising Online Amplification of Your Brand’, which will allow him to explain the digital strategy we have created and implemented at Bacardi Global Brands, and also challenge current thinking on how brands should view their digital strategy and what they could expect their ROI to be.

The conference is on Monday 17th September in London.

Hope to see you there.

DEWARS to be used as an Example of Innovation and New Media in Advertising

It is always nice when peers applaud your work but we had a really nice request earlier this week from the Programme Director of a BA Communications Studies course requesting to use the DEWARS website as an example of innovation and the use of new media in advertising.

It’s always nice to know that not only is your work appreciated but also good enough to be considered some of the best available to teach others how to use the media to best effect.

Bacardi B-Live Radio / MSN Messenger

We recently ran a campaign along with partners Universal McCann Interactive in London and Blue Modus in Colorado to take the first consumer branded on-line/mobile radio station – Bacardi B-Live Radio onto MSN Instant Messenger.

The campaign was highly successful, even more so when you understand that, as with all spirit brands, there has to be a positive age verification barrier to ensure only consumers above the legal drinking age in their country of residence can enter the site and interact with the brand.

The design of Bacardi B-Live Radio on MSN Instant Messenger:

The Objectives were simple:

• Take the Bacardi brand to the consumer;
• Place B-Live Radio in a context where individuals are likely to pass on recommendations; and
• Allow audience to listen to the same songs while communicating with each other.

The campaign ran in 4 markets; United Kingdom, Canada, Germany and Russia over a 3 month period.

As I said, the campaign was highly successful, although I can’t reveal the results as they are confidential to Bacardi; we do use this as a case study for potential clients.

The chart below shows the results against the target and as you can see half way through the campaign it was looking like it was going to provide stellar results. Having looked at this it was decided that there was not enough time left in the campaign to justify refreshing the content, which was the main reason for the plateau in the results.

In addition to this, the results also provided 60% more interaction time than expected with target consumers in their own environment.

And the Branding Effects:

• The majority of listeners surveyed agreed that it was good that they could listen to B-Live Radio whilst ‘chatting’ with friends on Messenger;
• The majority would recommend it to a friend; and
• Half said that the B-Live Radio integration has made Bacardi more appealing.

A highly successful result by any standard.

We Launch Dewars 12, Aberfeldy and Dewars Signature website

He have expanded the John Dewars and Sons website by including the Dewars 12, Aberfeldy and Dewars Signature products.

This is the first time that the website achieves the global consistency which has been one of the main requirements and a driving force for the company.

It also has allowed us to leverage the full domain name portfolio by mapping all the domains to the one website and then deep linking these domains to the content which is relevant to the consumer.

The full value of the site is now being realised with a 104% increase in website traffic since last August, when we first launched a holding website until we could launch this site. It’s also a testimony to the Strategy we developed and the flexibility of the website framework created.

The Dewars 12 website

The Aberfeldy Website

The Dewars Signature Website

Online banking scams increase

Online banking scams jumped 44% to £33.5m in 2006 according to an article in the Financial Time today, mainly down to phishing incidents even though frauds in total reduced by 3%.

Our friends, Fairwinds Partners recently wrote a article on phishing which is very interesting.

Salesforce Unexpected Shutdown

Last week Salesforce.com the Software as a Service (SaaS, previously known as Application Service Provider) shut down a partner site for some planned maintenance. The problem with this seems to be that Salesforce.com think they informed their partners of this, while their partners think they did not!

While this raises the obvious questions of communication and making sure you tell everyone, or at least your partners (they are your customers after all), what is going on, it also raises a very serious issue for the partners.

This issue is very simply, if you put critical applications in the hands of third parties you have to ensure the service you receive is very clearly defined in a Service Level Agreement (SLA) and known to everyone involved in the process. While everyone will make a mistake and every application system will have a glitch at some point, it is how you manage this that counts. It’s also prudent to make sure you have a back up plan.

This back up plan should be proportionate to the risk involved: if you risk losing everything then it’s worth investing in a serious back up plan or a full business continuity plan, if it’s just some data that you already have on an alternative system, then you are probably fine.

It’s good to learn from other people’s mistakes so that we don’t make the same mistakes!