Jennifer Watkiss says marketers should make the time to make timely and relevant communications. Here, she examines the findings of a ninth annual report, surveying more than 1,000 in-house and agency marketers.
Following months of negotiations, Belfast Zoological Gardens (BZG) has welcomed a critically endangered dragon to Belfast Zoo. (Don’t be alarmed . . . it’s the finale of a campaign to showcase Northern Ireland to millions of ‘Game of Thrones’ TV programme fans worldwide.)
Considered all but extinct, the animal (pictured) is now being housed in a specially designed enclosure and, where possible, his prey will be sourced from outside the zoo’s own collection. The infant male currently has a wing-span of 10ft, but when fully grown his skull alone will measure up to 23ft.
Belfast Zoo manager Mark Challis said: “We’re thrilled to have such an exceptionally rare creature here at Belfast Zoo. This dragon is an important addition not only for us, but for Northern Ireland as a whole. Despite their fearsome reputation and fabled ability to burn entire cities to ashes, we’d like to reassure the residents of Belfast that our keepers have received expert training, and we’re looking forward to seeing him thrive in his new environment.”
The animatronic dragon, which is operated by two controllers, marks the culmination of a campaign by Tourism Ireland in partnership with HBO to promote Northern Ireland as the home of ‘Game of Thrones’, and capitalise on the rise of screen tourism.
Last Tuesday, June 9, was arrival day and visitors to the zoo could witness ‘dragon feeding time’ and watch the chief vet give him a check-up. Other events in the series have captured the imagination of Game of Thrones fans, with some tracking down the stunts within hours of them going live. Video clips have attracted millions of views online.
Other stunts in the campaign include:
Three-eyed ravens (pictured), replicas of those used in Game of Thrones, were seen perched on top of old-fashioned wooden signs, specially erected to point the way to some of the iconic locations around Northern Ireland where the series is filmed. And replica dragon eggs were placed among fruit and vegetables in a market stall in St George’s Market in Belfast. The eggs were ‘for sale’ to people visiting the market for the price of 125 Gold Dragons – the currency used in Game of Thrones. What customers didn’t know was that one of the eggs was controlled by remote control and proceeded to rattle and wobble around, much to their surprise!
Tourism Ireland once again joined forces with HBO and its smash hit TV series Game of Thrones, to promote Northern Ireland around the world in 2015. The campaign has run for 14 weeks in total and built on the hugely successful campaign of 2014 – which generated almost one million clicks, comments and shares and reached about 100 million fans across the world.
Timed to coincide with the return of the long-awaited fifth season of Game of Thrones, the campaign was rolled out by Tourism Ireland through Facebook and Twitter in the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands and Scandinavia. It aimed to again leverage the incredible success of the HBO brand and the huge global popularity of Game of Thrones and its strong associations with Northern Ireland – the physical home of the production for the series and where much of the filming takes place.
Photos and videos were taken of the props in the various locations – and have been promoted by Tourism Ireland to some 100 million Game of Thrones fans around the world, as ‘real news’ items in the new campaign.
As well as extensive advertising on the two social media sites, Tourism Ireland has also been targeting its own active fanbase – posting and tweeting to almost three million of its Facebook fans and 270k followers on Twitter, globally. The ads direct fans to a specially-created section on Tourism Ireland’s international website, Ireland.com.
Jonathan Hulford-Funnell says regional differences and challenges are still affecting the cross-border marketer.
When it comes to marketing, AI will continue to impact the sector in two ways. Firstly, the types of jobs marketers will do and, secondly, the way campaigns are conceived, run and measured.
The retail industry has been abuzz with the idea of personalisation, where brands aim to deliver better customer experiences by tailoring content and offers. Clever retailers are taking this one step further and enriching this customer experience by using contextualisation, which looks at the content visitors engage with or what they purchase, as well as why they did so, says Amanda McCreary.
Integrating Facebook advertisements as part of a ‘traditional’ DM campaign has become a well proven and low-cost lead generation, branding and direct response mechanism. Adam Williams discusses use of Facebook as part of a DM campaign.
Adobe has released its Q1 Digital Advertising Benchmark Report, which identifies new trends.
The digital advertising space and highlights some of the key metrics that are important to the digital marketers from https://www.masamedia.co.il/, topics include emerging social media apps, Facebook ad impression growth and interaction rates, search engine spend, click-through-rates, and cost-per-click across different regions and devices.
In the need of more about how to start with Search engine optimization, social marketing and reputation marketing, with https://www.bluprobe.com/ here. you can find a great service for this and for any other digital marketing advise and guidance for you and your company.
Adobe Digital Index’s analysis is based on consumer data to brand sites during 2014 and 2015, +490 billion Facebook post impressions, +525 billion Google and Yahoo! Bing ad impressions, and +2 million social streaming app mentions.
View the full report
One of the greatest shifts in customer loyalty is the movement towards digital. Tim Barton discusses how retailers can rise to the challenge, raising the standard of customer loyalty programmes.
In today’s competitive marketplace, e-commerce companies need to capture a 360-degree picture of their potential consumers and create a single customer view (SCV), says Neil Capel.
Brands’ and celebrities’ worst nightmares could become a reality this June, when hundreds of questionable web domain 
names go up for grabs.
Names such as .sucks, .porn and .adult are just some of the TDLs that will become available, and experts are now advising businesses to purchase uncomplimentary names, before it’s too late.
Web hosting company 34SP.com has predicted that some of the world’s biggest brands could be subject to torrents of abuse from online trolls purchasing unfavourable domain names with the sole aim of tormenting brands and celebrities.
Indeed, Taylor Swift has already registered taylorswift.porn and taylorswift.sucks, while Microsoft has reserved Office.porn and Office.adult.
34SP predicts that thousands more registries will be made ahead of the June 1st deadline, when generic domain names are expanded to include more variations.
Daniel Foster (left), co-founder and technical director of 34SP.com, said: “Businesses should do everything in their power to avoid being associated with negative messages – it’s hard to imagine domain names like .sucks and .porn will foster positivity.
“Clearly some big brands are already taking this seriously by registering controversial names while we are still in a mandated period. However, after June 1st it becomes a free-for-all, so I’d advise all businesses with even a slight worry about how this could affect their business to swoop up the domains sooner rather than later.
“While some might use domains for good causes, by creating sites such as cancer.sucks for example, I’d predict that many will be swooping up the new names solely for defamatory purposes.”
Those who want to keep an eye on all the savoury and unsavoury new TLDs being released and applied for can do so on the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers’ (ICANN) website.