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6 January 2012

New Initiatives

A happy new year to everyone!

To kick-start 2012, Starbucks has now bought its Pay-by-app feature to the UK for iPhone users, but they must have a loyalty card to be able to open or use an account. An Android version is not on the market as of yet, but is expected to be released soon.

News International have launched two archive sites for The Sun and News Of The World  for a fee (minimum subscription £2.50 for 5 downloads). There is talk from Gordon Macmillan at Haymarket that this hints at a pay wall to go up at The Sun.

European Commission has said that there is to be more focus on Digital Content Policy this year with 2011 seeing mixed progress across the 21 actions in the heading.

Jony Ive, Apple’s Chief Designer, has been awarded a knighthood after epitomizing ”the strengths of British design and innovation.”

Company Structure

Littlewoods has seen a 300% conversion increase after a digital campaign which ran over Chrismas, which it claims is the most successful to date.

Netflix, despite losing about 800,000 subscribers in Q3, had a very successful Q4 in 2011, celebrating its 20million viewers watching 2billion hours of content. Broken into averages it means that each user streamed 100hours of content in one quarter, which is about 33 hours per month. These impressive figures bode well for the UK expansion.

Harrods website experienced technical difficulties which brought website down for well over 8 hours on Tuesday (3rd January) over the New Year’s sales trading peak. There was rumours that the site had been hacked but Harrod’s have not confirmed or announced any reason for the problems.

Trinity Mirror has acquired Communicator Corp the email marketing group from Sunderland for £8million in a continued bid to ramp up its digital business.

Industry Moves summary:

Yell has appointed Matt Anderson as Chief Strategy and Business Development Officer, who was formerly of Booz & Company and Gilt Group. They have also hired Barclay’s CMO for their board Libby (Elizabeth) Chambers as an independent non-executive director.

Yahoo has appointed Scott Thompson, Paypal president, as its new CEO to replace Carol Bartz.

To fill the gap left behind Scott Thompson at Paypal, John Donahoe CEO of Ebay, has been appointed to cover the role whilst he and the board look to replace Thompson.

Sainsbury’s has lost Rebecca Singleton to Morrisons where she is to be the Marketing Director, replacing James Condon who is leaving for family reasons.

Paul Dickinson, Sales and Marketing Director at Virgin Atlantic, is leaving after 10 years in the company, to join Christies Auction House.

Simon Pardon, previously MD of ITV’s Granada Enterprises and most recently Chief Trading Officer at Aegis Media, is leaving. He has said it is to pursue other interests.

Jon Tickner, ex-Head of Media Solutions at the Telegraph Media Group, has joined IPC Media as their new Creative Development Director.

Todd Teresi, formerly an Adobe Executive, has been poached by Apple to lead its mobile ad branch iAd.

Ian Cranna of Starbucks, has been appointed UK Marketing Head, replacing Brian Waring who has been promoted to a more international role.

Richard Haines of Harper Collins, is moving to Penguin’s Children’s Group as their new Acquisitions Manager for Media and Entertainment, where he will report to Publishing Director Eric Huang.

Social Media

Twitter has been buzzing this week after the enrollment of Rupert Murdoch and his wife. Though the story got weightier after Wendi Deng Murdoch, a verified account by Twitter, announced that it was not the actual Mrs Murdoch behind the account and that it was a fake. This has lead to a lot of questions being asked about the verification process, which Twitter prides itself on and keeps a closely guarded secret.

Burberry has celebrated its 10millionth Facebook fan which is still growing and proving the extreme success of the brand and its social media offering. In comparison Chanel has just under 5 million fans and Alexander McQueen has under 500,000 fans. The only fashion brand found that exceeds Burberry so far is US brand Victoria’s Secret at a whopping 16 million.

Google+ traffic saw a bump in the final quarter of 2011 including new signups and activity reaching 62 million users. According to analytics firm Chitika it saw its site increase 118% in activity between September and November (2011).

Digital Products

E-reader sales were boosted over Christmas with more than one million given as gifts (92% being Kindles), and tablet devices saw half a million given over the period. Despite the Kindles’ success, the Kobo’s e-book sales saw a seven-fold increase over the December month.

Unsurprisingly the app market saw an increase in downloads too on Chrismas day, up 125% globally to 242million.

The UK music market has been looking at its figures as digital sales continue to grow but album sales continue to fall.  CD sales fell by 13% and watched as digital albums saw a 24% rise. There is worry that whilst physical ownership is still a popular preference, a “backdrop of chronic piracy” still poses a huge problem for the industry.

The Rest

Christmas sees the internet at its quietest as Britons spend time with family and watch TV instead of going on the net. Sky Broadband said the peak time usage is down 27% compared to an average day. Interestingly though it was also revealed that New Year’s Day also saw a slump in traffic levels despite the online shopping sales.

In an article by David Strom of Read Write Web, it is predicted that IT’s biggest problem in 2012 will be staff turnover as ‘hypergrowth’ takes over with people wanting to be more challenged and redundancies being at such a high level (The CCCS found that 43% of people leaving jobs in Q2 left due to redundancy). You can read the article here.

Have a great weekend.