5 things you need to know this week

Steve Kaplan Marketing:

MoneySuperMarket is 2015’s most complained about ad

So it turns out a lot of Brits did not appreciate a twerking man in hot pants gracing their television screens.

Moneysupermarket.com’s ad racked up 1,513 complaints, thereby making it the most complained about ad of 2015 in a list compiled by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA).

Piers Newson-Smith, head of brand at MoneySuperMarket, says the brand isn’t worried about the complaints as it never breached the ASA’s code and the campaign was a huge success.

He adds: “Our ads bring to life that epic feeling you get when you save money at MoneySuperMarket and the great British public’s feedback on ‘Epic Strut’ was overwhelmingly positive.

“It really caught their imagination: the official video was viewed more than three million times and spawned countless parodies, including The Sun front page with George Osborne.”

The top takeaways from Mobile World Congress

Close to 100,000 people descended on Barcelona this week for Mobile World Congress, one of the industry’s largest trade shows.

For marketers, it is a chance to experience new technology, meet brands and companies disrupting their industries and consider the future of their brands.

One of this year’s biggest talking points was virtual reality (VR). Every brand wants to be part of the nascent market and prove that their solution will be the one that ensures this technology finally takes off.

The importance of VR was underlined by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s surprise appearance at Samsung’s press event. He predicted VR will be “the most social platform” and, in a bid to prove how seriously Facebook takes VR, revealed it has created a new ‘social VR’ team that will focus entirely on how the technology can help people connect.

Volvo’s strategy to end car deaths by 2020 boosts engagement scores

Volvo Car’s brand vision is to ensure nobody is killed or seriously injured in, or by, one of its new cars by 2020. According to the brand’s VP of global marketing Thomas Andersson, its vision has already made a “major impact” on brand engagement levels.

Andersson told Marketing Week: “This 2020 vision is a really strong brand purpose for Volvo and perhaps one that wouldn’t have been possible three years ago when we weren’t as confident in our marketing.

“We want to have a strong social message as if we just went down the same old route as our rivals [with celebrity campaigns] we would just be one of many, we wouldn’t be adding anything new. I believe the public want brands to stand for something important.”

BrewDog is not worried about copy-cats as it releases its beers recipes online

This year, BrewDog is on a mission to “give back” to the home brewing community. In order to do this, it has made the recipes of all of its 216 beers publicly available.

However, the brand seems unfazed about corporate competitors copying its products.

Speaking to Marketing Week, the brand’s head of marketing Sarah Warman said: “If anyone can replicate the beers and do it as well as us, then good luck to them. They’re not going to manage. The versions we have released are scaled down to home brewing recipes, so it’s slightly different if you’re brewing them on a bigger scale.

“If someone wants to give that a bash then they’re more than welcome to, but they obviously don’t have the reputation behind them or the balls to release their own recipes in the first place, so they probably won’t do as well as we have out of it.”

Instagram hits 200,000 advertisers and welcomes its ‘diverse’ advertiser base

Instagram first opened up its advertising globally last September and according to figures supplied by the social network, 75% of its advertisers are outside of the US and operate in more than 200 countries.

James Quarles, the social media giant’s global head of business and brand development, is particularly pleased with the brand’s “diverse” advertiser base.

He explains: “Instagram is now the “look book” for brands people love and the shop window for small businesses on mobile. We are excited to welcome 200,000 advertisers to the platform because the more diverse our advertiser base, the more relevant we can make the ads that people see.”

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