Inspiration Information #1.

January Blues. What January Blues? We're raring to go here at the Old Treacle Factory and to usher in a year we expect to bring exciting innovations to our work and the industry in general we'll be blogging some of the trends, technology, cultural and business developments pushing things forward throughout January.

Crystal ball gazing is a mug’s game, so we’re not going to set ourselves up as marketing soothsayers but we do want to share what's exciting us as we enter into the most exciting year yet at RPM. These are the things putting a spring in our step every morning. Please share yours with us here or on Twitter, and check the Pinterest boards for daily inspiration.

'Social content', not social media

Content Marketing was the buzz phrase of 2012 for digital marketers and looks set to dominate the agenda this year for the Econsultancy crowd. For us, the important revelation the marketing world woke up to here was that a social strategy is not about what platform your brand should be on (Facebook? Pinterest?) but what content your brand’s audience wants from you. The platforms, of course, follow.

Writing in Marketing Magazine in December, Gordon MacMillan claimed that 2013 would be about throwing your social media strategy out the window and starting again. His point was just this; that brands should start with what they are going to say whether that’s called branded content, brand journalism or content marketing.

Too many brands know this all too well from Burberry to Bodyform (who both executed great work in this space last year) for it to be a revelation. We look forward to more coming around to the idea of entertaining, adding value, supporting customer passions and opening up their relationship with their audience through the power of content.

One note of caution on ‘content marketing’ though, watch out for the digital marketers who will turn this into another branch of the more dubious aspects of SEO, creating list article after list article as catnip for social sharers.

Real World Digital

From devices like the Twine box, which can be wired to Tweet when your washing is done or when the kids have their fingers in the chocolate cupboard, to the Nest thermostat which is controlled from your phone and learns your schedule to control the heat in your home accordingly, the ‘Internet of Things’ is going mainstream this year.

We love the applications that we’re already seeing in the marketing world – Bubblegum dispensers controlled by Twitter hashtags, city-centre snowstorms triggered by Foursquare checkins.

Take a look at our ‘Real World Digital’ board on Pinterest for more inspiration.

Start-ups go B2B

It’s getting harder and harder for the slew of consumer apps to cut-through amidst all the noise and that troublesome requirement for meaningful revenue models. Cynical tech scene commentator ReadWriteWeb reckons this will be the year when we take the axe to all those unused apps ‘with filters’ that have flooded our smartphones.

Some smart maneuverers have already sidestepped their original consumer proposition and gone B2B in search of meaningful revenue – take a look at Percolate who started out as a content digest for the time-poor culled from your social feeds but is now using its technology to power dashboard software that combines insight with content publishing for brand clients.

As it becomes more and more important for the tech innovators to make money we foresee more and more opportunities for brands to collaborate and bring value to their audiences in partnerships with tech’s best minds.

More next week and if you'd like to bring something to our attention, hit us @rpmltd on Twitter.

Luxe Box London by Lucy

On the 10th - 23rd December one of are very own, Lucy Heale, is showcasing Luxe Box London at the Start-Up Britain Christmas Shop in Richmond. PopUp Britain was created to give new British brands a rare opportunity to get their products onto the British High Street.

So pop down to meet Lucy and see her bold, iconic boxes packed with exquisite, hand-picked treats. The Urban Goddess Box will be on show; the perfect Christmas gift for those who appreciate quality and style.

The box includes the beautiful Wild Planet lavender scented candle ideal for long soaks in the bath, mouth-watering Rococo rose-pink champagne truffles for cheeky indulgent moments, a deliciously soft Tweedmill Textiles throw, a vintage collectable edition of classic love story Sense and Sensibility, a Thornback and Peel pigeon and jelly notebook and an elegant Reiko Kaneko lipstick mug.

Check out www.luxeboxlondon.com for more information.

The Brand Event and Eventia Awards

It's been a truly award winning week here at RPM, after incredible evenings at both the Brand Event and Eventia Awards.

The Brand Event Awards celebrate the event marketing strategies of the globe's biggest brands. On Thursday, RPM won the GRAND PRIX award for 'Best Alcoholic Drinks Event Strategy' for Smirnoff Presents Sensations, a one-of-a-kind dance event for 10,000 people at The O2. The M&S Agricultural show 2012 also won 'Best FMCG Event Strategy'.

Next we were off to the 2012 Eventia Awards, where RPM were awarded PLATINUM, the evening's most prestigious accolade, which recognises the agency that scored consistently high across all of its entries.

The following wins contributed to the score… 

GOLD 'Best Public Event' - Talisker Sail-in Cinema

SILVER 'Best Public Event' - Smirnoff Presents Sensations

GOLD 'Best Brand Experience' - Talisker Sail-in Cinema

SILVER 'Best Brand Experience' - M&S Agricultural Shows 2012

And finally, RPM Promotional People won gold for 'Event Services Supplier of the Year' for our work with Coca Cola and Sky.

What a fantastic end to 2012! Well done everyone.

Field Marketing & Brand Experience Awards 2012

Fantastic news as RPM and our clients Sky and Talisker picked up awards from the FM&BE's last night.

This year a special award for Experience Brand of the Year was introduced and RPM nominated Sky. Recognising a brand that has truly embraced live experience and made a significant impact on consumer awareness and brand perception, we were thrilled that Sky was declared overall winner!

The Brand Fans Award looks to award campaigns that have deeply engaged consumers and stimulated behaviour change. In this category RPM and Sky were awarded GOLD for Skyride, a campaign we are very proud of!

The Talisker Sail-In Cinema activation was awarded SILVER in the Most Effective Integration/Amplification category and BRONZE in the Most Immersive Event (Mass Consumer) category.

A tremendous evening for us and our clients and a huge congratulations to all involved on these campaigns.

Investing in ideas

The temptation to brainstorm the next Facebook in a creative session when responding to the latest brief seems ill advised at best. So, news that Coke has launched an Instagram competitor caught us off guard. Perhaps mobile photo-sharing is a big enough pie for them to happily take a slice and share it with the huge audiences in their owned channels that are yet to embrace this brave new world?

But, given the challenges that start-ups now face raising funding in an environment in which there’s increasing scepticism that those ad revenues will ever meet that magic point that turns an accelerating audience into a profitable business, perhaps now is a good time to reconsider the brand’s role in the start-up gold rush. Lots of great ideas struggle to convert an initial rush of new users into a consistent, engaged user base and it’s this engagement that investors will be looking at when bullet-testing the appeal of an idea. Getting to critical mass is still a faith game.

But what if an investor entered with the kind of reach that the best brands have access to through their owned channels, one that was able to help bridge that difficult period between the early adopters succumbing to ‘the next thing’ and a meaningful long-term relationship with normal users? Followers of the ‘growth hacking’ ethos who believe that early stage start-ups should disregard traditional marketing techniques and focus on tweaking usability and unlocking the ‘must have’ experience their product offers will disagree, but a brand patron might be a helpful partner here.

There are some great examples of brand-initiated apps, most of which follow the rule that an app should either be useful or irresistibly enjoyable while also born from the brand’s DNA. But there are so many great ideas out there in start-up land that will never reach an audience does the brand ever really need to build functionality from scratch?

Certainly, if we’re not aware of the ideas that are coming from this period of intense creativity then our own creativity will suffer. Worse, we may miss opportunities for our clients’ campaigns, platforms and experiences that create value for everyone in this chain – especially the audience.

Where’s your Felix moment coming from?

We’ve all watched in awe as Felix Baumgartner has demanded a new definition of ‘extreme’ and, in our industry, we should have been equally hypnotised by the benchmark set by his sponsors, Red Bull, in connected communications. By way of a couple of minor diversions into pre-social web sharing principles and the death of SEO as we know it, we’d like to argue that now is the time to have your damascene conversion to the currently buzz art of ‘content marketing’.

Exhibit one. Take this fascinating and passionately argued piece asking us to consider the existence of a 'social web' pre-web 2.0 and the ongoing relevance of pre-web 2.0 social sharing activity (you know, forwarding emails, posting to forums and the like). Because a great swathe of reporting in web analytics fails to account in detail where a referral has come from, this often gets wrongly identified as 'direct' traffic. The author argues that this is often the pre-web 2.0 traffic that you may recall from a time when we shared links via instant messenger, email and so on.

He calls this 'dark social', presuambly due to its 'off-the-radar' nature. The theory is that, even now, these sources are often responsible for 2.5x the referral impact of Facebook; in some cases up to 69 percent of social traffic may be coming from these kinds of sources.

Exhibit two. At a recent panel session on key digital trends for 2013 we were treated to an unusually candid assessment of the future of SEO by a couple of figures that have enjoyed a prosperous decade practicing that occasionally dark art. Namely, that optimising rubbish content for search will no longer cut it. This, mark you, is the SEO industry admitting that they can no longer get away with peddling search-optimised crap.

The reason? Google Penguin and Panda. Penguin is an algorithm (no come back… we promise this will be worth it) that penalises the search ranking of sites which practice the darker arts of SEO and Panda is effectively an algorithm that prioritises quality content in search results. On that latter one, you'll just have to trust us - we can't tackle the subjective notion of 'quality' in this post.

So, not only is the 'social web' a simple evolution of sharing behaviours that were well rooted in a pre-Zuckerberg web (the difference now simply being that some of us choose to publish and archive the things we share via Twitter, Facebook et al) but Google, the principle content delivery tool of the web, is working hard to purify any barriers that its technology has placed between audiences and the makers of good content.

The conclusion we're left to draw? Your content and social media strategy are supporting players that can have a huge impact on successful communications. But their role is to help people find great content and share it. Daily we see examples of great content that surges through our Twitter and Facebook feeds without much in the way of a content or social strategy.

Now, let’s bring Felix back to wake them up at the back. Red Bull Stratos brings truly inspirational content and effective strategy together in an event that’s brilliantly promoted and then handed over to the community (with careful management) to bring to life by virtue of their genuine excitement about the proposition. In this case: 'man attempts act that defies nature'.

Perhaps because of Red Bull's mastery of social channels the 'dark social' impact of this campaign registers less than the averages discussed earlier but you can be sure that as word of Felix Baumgartner's appointment with nature spread from sons to fathers, to mothers and their friends, even Red Bull lost full control of the channels.

This serves both as a reminder of the impact that digital can have now on how we experience content in a connected environment and of the flesh and blood impact of the 'real' on what constitutes a great communication. In a future where great content is the most powerful currency for brand communications these ingredients are inseparable. But undoubtedly, the first question you should ask yourself is ‘where’s the Felix moment going to come from’?

Sky Ride Edinburgh & Sky Ride Ipswich are a roaring success!

10,000 cyclists enjoyed a fantastic day at Sky Ride Edinburgh, as the city was transformed into a bike rider’s paradise. It was the first time Edinburgh had hosted a Sky Ride and participants cycled around the 10km traffic-free route passing by some of the city’s most iconic landmarks - Scottish Parliament, Holyrood Palace and Arthur’s Seat.

There were plenty of activities for everyone to enjoy; at Holyrood Park crowds were stunned by some amazing BMX and mountain bike demonstrations. Others enjoyed a well-earned break with a coffee from the British Cycling Bike Café and lots of children got creative, decorating their Sky Ride bibs in the Art Attack area. The Bike Station and The Edinburgh Bicycle Cooperative were busy all day providing Dr Bike advice and repairs to participants. Chris Hoy and Edith Bowman attended and we carried out a live Q&A with Chris Hoy with questions submitted through facebook and twitter.

Over in Ipswich, 12,000 riders took to their bikes and cycled the 5km route in the sunshine. The riders were also lucky enough to wave off Team Sky as they embarked on Britain’s biggest bike race – the Tour of Britain. To celebrate and support Bradley Wiggins, Mark Cavendish and the other Team Sky riders, we brought some very special activities to Sky Ride Ipswich. Inspired residents had the chance to take on a Team Sky challenge and try to beat Wiggins’ Time Trial time – on a static bike. Riders signed autographs and chatted to fans, and a few lucky supporters even got a tour of the Team Sky bus.There was a whole host of entertainment all around the route, and activity areas at the Customs House, Alderman Park and the Cornhill Forecourt which delighted riders as they rode around the route.