Am I alone in totally disagreeing with Google’s policy of allowing companies to bid on competitors brand names? As a professional marketer I have a problem with this. To me it’s almost marketing piracy. And as a consumer I am now getting increasingly annoyed that when I google something very specific , most of the [...]

I’ve only seen a photo of the new Virgin planes livery, but I have to say that it looks somewhat non-descript. It’s just a clean modern typeface: not very eye-catching and nothing to make it stand out. The brand is now positioning itself as the future of air travel, after spending a lot of money [...]

You learn something new every day. It took us Brits years to work out what a hash key is #. Now it’s being used in front of the word ‘fail’ on social media sites to register criticism of a brand or product. Evidently it started on Twitter as disgruntled Apple users took to sharing their [...]

There are some strange job titles around, but I think I’ve just seen the craziest and it comes from an ad agency. Lorna Hawtin of TBWA Manchester is Disruption Director.

I quickly checked a few major hotel chains and found that Hilton have 47,000 Facebook fans, Best Western just over 20,000, Holiday Inn a measly 1,300, Premier Inn 1600 & Malmaison 1 person!!!! This suggests that hotel companies don’t have professional social media strategies.

Advertising on Twitter is finally here, in the form of ‘promoted tweets’ which are displayed at the top of rankings when people enter a search term into Twitter – a bit like sponsored links on Google.