UDC is a professional dance company providing dancers and shows for film, TV and corporate events for such companies as The X Factor, Sony, Bench and Motorola.
Part of their business is running dance workshops for Hen Parties. To support their online marketing campaign they required a simple A5 flyer to hand out at wedding trade shows.
Northstar designed the flyer (incorporating client photography retouched in Photoshop and library photography bought under license from shutterstock), provided copywriting and print ready artwork.
The Ilkley Dress Agency approached Northstar to re-design their website so that it reflected the quality of their stock; they sell high quality, new and pre-owned fashions, including clothing, accessories, jewellery and footwear.
The thinking behind the design was simple: if you’re selling fashion, the site needs to look fashionable. The big headline, colour scheme and layout was taken from the style of women’s fashion magazines.
In this market imagery is vitally important, however, because of the high turnover of stock no existing products could be used. The solution was to use Royalty Free imagery from Shutterstock and iStockphoto. By using an image of an undressed woman the photograph becomes seasonless and reinforces the message “For fashion - we’ve got you covered from head to toe.”
Although the budget was limited a certain amount of SEO was carried out to target the search phrases “Clothes Shops Ilkley” and “Shopping Ilkley.”
Feeling like the world is becoming less friendly? Social theorist Jonathan Zittrain begs to difffer. The Internet, he suggests, is made up of millions of disinterested acts of kindness, curiosity and trust.
Jonathan Zittrain wants to make sure the electronic frontier stays open — and he’s looking to the Internet’s millions of users for its salvation.
Last week Facebook announced that it had surpassed 300 million users, and now the company has announced a strategic partnership with the Nielsen Company. This partnership is aimed at helping marketers better use the web for developing and marketing new products.
“Nielsen is the leader in measurement and is an excellent partner for us as we look to provide marketers with richer ad effectiveness data,” said Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. “The combination of our unique ability to quickly and effectively poll a sample of our more than 300 million users and Nielsen’s expertise in data analysis will give marketers access to powerful data they can use to understand and improve current and future campaigns.”
The companies have already announced a new product called Nielsen BrandLift, which is designed to provide marketers with “effectiveness measurement” for Facebook advertising. The product will launch in the US with select test partners this week. It is expected to roll out to all Facebook advertisers within the next few months.
BrandLift will take the form of opt-in polls on Facebook’s homepage, which will let advertisers know more of what makes consumers tick, by the sound of it. It is described in the announcement: “Nielsen BrandLift measures aided awareness, ad recall, message association, brand favorability and purchase consideration via a set of short, specially designed one or two question surveys.” The surveys will appear on Facebook’s homepage where ads normally appear.
“Facebook is an increasingly vital link between consumers and brands,” said John Burbank, CEO of Nielsen’s online division. “We will now be able to add deep knowledge of this important social network to our unmatched media measurement and consumer insight across all three screens.”
“Together we will be able to provide the missing elements to clients seeking better understanding of how Web content and online advertising affect consumer behavior,” added Burbank.
Nielsen will be conducting hundreds of BrandLift tests over the next few months. Last month, Facebook had the 4th largest unique audience in the US among all web brands.
In February, Twitter turned more than a few heads by raising $35 million at a $250 million valuation. Now, people should be careful that they don’t break their figurative necks, since the company’s reportedly upped the ante by raising around $50 million at a $1 billion valuation.
Crazy as it may sound to some folks, the rumor’s almost certain to be true. Michael Arrington received word of it from several sources, and so did Peter Kafka. Plus, Biz Stone tweeted last night that he’d spent part of the day in a board meeting.
Then you have to consider that some experts believe Twitter’s worth much more than $1 billion. (Robert Scoble considers the company worth $5 billion to $10 billion, for example.)
So let’s look at the ramifications of Twitter’s $1 billion valuation. It implies that Twitter’s backers think the site will continue to grow at a ferocious pace. They must be confident that achieving a profit’s possible, too, and they can’t view direct competitors - as well as Facebook - as much of a threat.
Anyway, Arrington reported that Insight Venture Partners, which has invested in companies like Divx, Hitwise, and Newegg, is leading the funding round.
Anyone over 30 will remember how funny, intelligent and entertaining TV commercials used to be, Benson & Hedges posters were almost works of art, ads in the colour supplements were usually more interesting than the articles themselves.
But times have changed, the public eye has moved elsewhere - and with it, has gone the revenue and investment in creativity.
The positive result of this shift in media, is that mass marketing is now accessible to all via the internet.
If you have ever wondered why traditional marketing is dying on its feet, here are a few statistics that will blow your socks off.
A few facts for your fingertips:
# By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers….96% of them have joined a social network
# Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web
# Years to Reach 50 millions Users: Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)…Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months…iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
# If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 4th largest between the United States and Indonesia
# 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction
# % of companies using LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees….80%
# The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
# The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube
# Wikipedia has over 13 million articles…some studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78% of these articles are non-English
# There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
# Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth
# 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
# 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations
# Only 14% trust advertisements
# Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
A new website has been launched today by Northstar, for Halko the timber construction company.
Northstar was approached by Dorrington Construction to create a website for their timber buildings created in partnership with Finlammelli of Finland.
The project involved creating a company name (Halko is the Finnish word for logs), corporate identity, website design and construction to W3C standards, domain name registration and hosting, email and email stationery.
Tweet Seek is a free Twitter search widget that you can embed into your website or blog, giving your visitors live results on any given topic.
It was developed by some friends of mine at Blueclaw, an SEO company based in Leeds, UK.
Tweet Seek is fully customizable, with a range of skins, and you can either choose the results or add a search box so people can explore for themselves.
Go ahead try it, just type in any topic into the search box and get live results as tweets are posted word-wide.
Some pretty fancy javascript dancing is going on here.
You can customize your Twitter search results, reskin and grab the code at the Tweet Seek website.
