A break from blogging! I’m away until July 6th 2009

I’m taking a short break from blogging as I’m away on holiday for three weeks from Friday 12 June, leaving my colleagues at Marketing Week to provide the insight, opinion and analysis for you. I will be back at work on July 6th and back to blogging again.

In the meantime, if you get bored, I suggest you check out the main Marketing Week website, which is constantly being updated or my colleague Stuart Smith, who is back from his own holiday on June 22.

In the language of Terminator (once again hitting box offices around the world), “I’ll be back”. But not till July 6th.

Thanks for your patience!

Ruth

Why Kaka is worth $100m to Real Madrid

It seems that while bankers are busy taking abuse for sky-high salaries and bonuses, footballers are escaping the economic gloom. Or at least that’s true for Kaka, who has left Milan to join Real Madrid for around £56m.

But why are these deals, which seem extraordinarily enormous in cash terms, still so popular with clubs? Well, according to Professor Simon Chadwick, who was commissioned by Weber Shandwick Sport to run the figures, the Kaka deal could be worth as much as $100m per year to Real Madrid.

This is because the signing is likely to boost shirt sales, sponsorship revenue, match ticket sales and the team’s global fan base. If Manchester United’s current golden boy Cristiano Ronaldo was to join Kaka at Real Madrid, this could be worth up to an additional $75m a year, should Manchester United sell the current FIFA World Player of the Year – meaning a double-signing could be worth $175m each year for the Spanish club.

What’s Chadwick basing this on? The Becks effect, it seems.

When David Beckham moved to Real Madrid, his tenure at the Santiago Bernabeu earnt the club $600 million in sales of shirts and other merchandise alone (with a million shirts sold in just six months), increasing merchandising profits by 137% over four seasons between 2003/4 and 2006/7.

So perhaps the answer to why footballer transfers are recession-proof is that until these deals no longer offer such potentially fabulous return on investment to clubs, the big bucks are likely to stay in play.

Microsoft’s Bing – does it have any bang?

Up until now, I haven’t blogged about Microsoft’s new search engine Bing because I hadn’t quite made up my mind about it. I went to Google’s Zeitgeist event earlier this year where the company premiered some of its new tools to help people search more effectively and in different ways but I was still waiting to spend some proper time on Microsoft’s Bing.

(It is worrying that Bing still makes me think of Friends’ Chandler Bing every time it crops up in coversation. I’m sure I’m not the only one.)

Paidcontent (via The Guardian) had an interesting piece today about how Bing could benefit advertisers more than Google. Apparently new eye-tracking data suggests that people might look more at the ads on Bing than Google….

My view on Bing so far? Google doesn’t have to be too worried (as yet). I don’t believe that people are especially loyal to their Google experience, but it’s a simple process and until something comes along that changes the whole way we search, it will continue to offer a solution which seems simplest to advertisers and users. Even if more people glance at an ad on Bing, Google will still deliver more numbers of eyes altogether for some time yet.

Earlier this year, the geeks were talking about Wolfram Alpha, which ranks its results in a different way. Rather than trawling websites using spiders like Google, it amasses information on the search term.

So if I use ‘Google’ to search for myself in a narcissistic way, it brings up a slightly dodgy journalism blog, a podcast I took part in and links to stories I have written. Stuff about me. Meanwhile, WA brings up the fascinating information that the most likely age for someone called Ruth Mortimer in the US right now is somewhere around 85! Most Ruth Mortimers were born back in the 1890s-1930s, while the Ruth Mortimer name seems to have petered out a bit recently.

Now, it seems to me that if you want to know some real knowledge about “Ruth Mortimer”, then WA can give you the bigger picture about that term. But Google has the more human take on it. A search on Bing, meanwhile, reveals a different set of results altogether – some about my stories, some about other people with the same name. And some random plottings on a map of anything with “ruth” in it.

So I won’t be holding my breath yet for Bing to start stripping away Google’s finances. But any new innovation is obviously a good thing; the search world will be stronger for having more than one option and way of doing things. And you never know, maybe one day, Bing will hit on that formula that makes more sense to searchers than Google…..

Marks & Spencer celebrates staying in fashion for 125 years

Spent a great evening last night with Marks & Spencer, celebrating the brand turning 125. It was good to catch up with some of the executives there, including Stuart Rose and Steve Sharp, to hear all about the company’s plans for the year ahead (…can’t give anything away here, sadly…).

Steve Sharp, the marketing director for M&S, was talking about a charity bikeride he is undertaking this week on behalf of the store’s 125 year anniversary. Lots of the retailer’s activities this year go towards its 125 Charity Challenge, which aims to raise £1.25m for local and regional charities between May and September. As someone who once lasted a whole four minutes on a cycling trip – oh dear – I wish Steve all the best with this!

Another topic of conversation during the event was about the number of retailers celebrating their birthdays this year. It’s not just M&S – Sainsbury’s has also been celebrating 140 years, for example. Everyone agreed that with the economic environment being so poor, these occasions provided something positive to keep marketing about. Would the anniversaries have been so noted or communicated in a better economic climate? Perhaps not, or at least we wouldn’t have noticed them so much.

It’s worth noting at this point that despite the recent “Big Bra-Gate” scandal affecting M&S, there were none of those big “We’ve Boobed” posters up anywhere. It was all very tasteful with lots of the new autumn collections out on display. And even though there have recently been rumours about Stuart Rose leaving the business before his planned 2011 departure date, Rose seemed as committed and excited by the challenges of M&S as ever, chatting happily to me about what Britishness and being a British brand means in this day and age.

My only disappointment: none of those new cupcakes with the fillings inside were around. I like those cupcakes. I imagine the innovation meeting at M&S headquarters went like this: “Hmm, let’s make some cupcakes. But how could we make a cupcake, already covered in buttercream, even more tasty? Hmm…what about adding a delicious filling inside?” But lack of cupcakes aside, an interesting evening.

Will users Digg the social media site’s new ad model?

Last year, our friends over at Facebook were talking about “engagement ads“. These are essentially ads that try to mimic the way that people actually use the site. In other words, people can comment on them in the same way they comment on their friends’ profiles and so on.

Now Digg is following the same strategy by planning “social ads” which follow how users interact with the website. Digg ads will appear in the stream of headlines on the homepage and provide the same chance for users to “digg” or “bury” the links as they choose.

While the site is letting users choose what to recommend or not recommend, in line with its philosophy, does advertising really fit in the social media environment? Digg plans to charge advertisers based on how popular their ad becomes – a nice pricing model trick, but will it take off? Let me know your views!

IKEA hopes its opera performances will make it sing

Think of IKEA and these words might come to mind: low-cost, utilitarian and practical. None of these words seem to fit very effectively with opera, which is exactly what the retailer is bringing to its London store.

A production entitled “Flatpack” is being performed for four nights only in the brand’s Wembley branch. Mammoth Music Theatre aims for the production to explore themes like consumer decisions and domestic issues. The store restaurant will also host a special “opera meal deal”.

I’m not sure how strategic this partnership is, but does it really matter? Not really, it just sounds like something that will keep people a bit interested in a retail environment that can feel a bit cavernous and dauting – even possibly encouraging people to spend longer in-store than on other visits, which is all good news for a shop.

Check out the video below:

Max Factor no longer has star quality in the US market

Procter & Gamble is pulling its Max Factor brand out of the US market. The company is phasing it out early next year in the American region. It will continue to be sold abroad in more than 70 countries but P&G in the US is planning to concentrate its marketing efforts instead on its Cover Girl brand, which has more coverage (see what I did there?).

Max Factor, despite being named after a legendary Hollywood make-up artist, only has around one per cent market share in the States. The company was set up in 1909 and developed the “pan-cake” foundation, what claims to be the first concealer and the first “waterproof” makeup. In fact, it is said that the reason we call cosmetics “make up” is because that is what Max Factor coined as the informal term (an early marketer, it seems).

Max Factor will continue to be sold internationally as it brings in $1.2bn in revenues to P&G, so it could hardly be described as failing outside the American continent. In the UK and Russia, it is allegedly the number two brand and it’s number one in 20 others. But in the US, where screen legends like Marilyn Monroe wore the brand’s products, the marque will no longer be on sale.

Does this leave P&G in a weaker position globally? Or is it simply sensible rationalisation in a recession? Your views please…..

Photo below of a campaign Madonna did for Max Factor in 1999 in Europe:

CSI experience solves corporate bonding issues

This is probably the best “corporate bonding” programme of all time – a CSI-themed experience. Now, being a major fan of the American drama series CSI (and a wannabe forensic scientist despite being squeamish in real life), it’s no surprise that this appeals to me.

But it is apparently also appealing to a number of brands, who are sending employees along to learn to work better together by solving staged “crimes” just like the TV detectives. As I suspect real-life crimes are not quite as glossy and fun, this sounds like the perfect answer to all those telly addicts like me, who have always fancied entering some fingerprints into CODIS. And, er, obviously great for teams within businesses to work better together…….