Smarter SEO beats bigger Adwords budgets

It was just a few years ago we were introducing our sometimes skeptical clients to the cost efficiencies of online search in their marketing mix. It didn’t take long for them to become converts, with conversion rates so much higher than press and radio advertising. It was as simple as buying category keywords prospects were searching for when researching a purchase decision. For one client in particular, a cosmedic company, a Google Adword campaign was delivering sales for under $30 when traditionally they were resigned to having to spend upward of $400 per sale using press ads. Like most things in the world today, things have changed very quickly.

Google Adwords not the cheap fix it once was

While our clients were at the front of the adoption curve, plenty of followers have made online adword campaigns much less cost effective. Google is in the unique position in Australia of having a controlling share of the search engine market. While in Asia players such as MSN offer advertisers alternative places to reach prospects, here 90% of all people who search online use Google. So if you are an advertiser, you are competing with every one of your competitors for the same limited listing in a limitless bidding war. If you want to be on the first page of results, the same words we bought for cents a few years ago can now cost dollars. Our client who used to be able to grab sales conversions for $30 and below would now have to regularly expect to pay $150 or more. Meanwhile, newspapers are doing deals, so the gap for many advertisers is closing again. Or is it? What are the advertisers at the front of the curve doing?

Natural search is the answer to gaining exposure online

At UNO we’ve been delivering our clients what is close to free leads for years now using Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) techniques. How does it work? A Google search page has three sections. Paid results appear across the top and down the right side of the screen. This is what advertisers bid against each other for. Yet research has shown 75% of all people who search on Google ignore the paid ads and click on the results in the third area, the natural or organic listing in the main body of the page.

So while the majority of companies are still competing in a bidding war for 25% of the prospects, smart advertisers are using SEO experts to help them achieve a higher listing in the main game, the natural search listings that you don’t have to keep paying for again and again. Done right, SEO for natural search pays long term dividends.

Here is the news in mass media marketing

A few weeks ago I cancelled my daily newspaper subscription. Not because of the increasing use of bad puns in headlines, a direct result of the publisher subbing out writing to young graduates to lower costs and supposedly bring a youthful feel to the paper. No, I cancelled on the day the business section shrunk to just three pages of mostly superficial stories.

I’m not alone, an associate cancelled his subscription because of the increase in typos and doubling up of stories in different sections.  

While once loyal readers are deserting, publishers are desperately trying to entice. The same paper gave me a free 10-week subscription when I signed up to a wine club the following week. I read online free from the same masthead. Since 2001 the Media Alliance estimates that the number of full-time journalists working on Australian newspapers has fallen by 13 per cent or roughly 1000 to 7500.

The hen and egg question of what came first – the thinness of content or the decrease in advertising to underwrite good journalism, is superseded by the issue of where have the readers gone?

Online, just like you.

The news in the last few months is an indication the tipping point is here…there are lists, (found online in seconds) of the latest closures around the world, from Colorado’s oldest paper, The Rocky Mountain News to The Boston Globe.

PriceWaterhouseCoopers latest survey predicts global newspaper decline of 10.2% this year.

What does the decrease in readership of press mean to mass marketers?

Well there’s no refuge in TV. The diminishing returns of this medium in Australia, where the cost per thousand eyeballs doubled over a seven year period while the number of potential viewers declined by 20% means ever diminishing returns for TV ads.

Yet there are still people who spruik packaged TV ad formats that exclaim “Brand News” on TV is more effective? Than what, bad brand ads on TV? Either way, with fewer viewers for greater expense than ever before, the high cost of entry to producing and running ads on TV are driving marketers away. While a FinReview survey of marketers indicated they are sticking with TV ads for their brand marketing, the long term media spend trends show doing the same as before is on the way out.

Australian online ad spend is up 14 percent to an annual $1.4 billion

The smart marketing investment is micro-managed across dozens of touch points, from the web to activation at point of sale.  The smart marketer is looking for measurable results, insightful strategies and creative that cuts through and adds value in a sea of clutter.

Why the CEO has to be the chief blogger

Successful social media strategy starts at the top of every business

It's misguided to think social media can simply be delegated to the youngest in the business, or outsourced to a digital agency. Social media is simply another relationship management channel. So it makes sense the strategy of what will be discussed in social media and what won't lies with the CEO. Social media is the one place the CEO's message can get through direct to the individual, without being filtered.

So if you're the CEO, consider this medium as your direct way to have a personal conversation where you can champion what you believe in. Before you begin, reconsider what you want your business to be known for. Ask yourself what is at the heart of why people should buy from your business, rather than your competitors?

Recent research by PR firm Weber Shandwick shows social media has positive impacts on business. (Click to enlarge.)

This simple checklist will help frame the social media agenda for your business

• What is the purpose of the business, what will success look like?
• What is the business strategy?
• What does the business believe in?
• How does it add value?
• What are its beliefs and ethics, its reason for being, its mojo?
• What is the business story? The way you express your differentiation, the reason for customers to choose you.
• Who does the business want to help? Who do you want to leave for your competitors to lose time or money trying to please?
• Who does the business want to influence? The gatekeepers to your prospects, or perhaps the well connected people who might bad mouth you through ignorance?
• Who does the business want to work with? Do you have affinity partners or associations you can share your blogs with?
• What kind of people does the business want to attract? It now matters what you look like in the blogoshere because it's the first place most potential employees will check you out.

Reputation risk has been elevated by social media

As equally important as having a social media presence is what you say. Being active across social media brings new risks. What is published online stays online, potentially forever. No wonder reputation risk is now the number one concern of CEOs globally according to the latest report from Deloitte.

Perhaps if more CEOs took control they would minimise the risk of staff who know less being the main originators of social media conversations. The CEO is best placed to set the agenda, staff can then follow through.

According to research by Weber Shandwick, more than six in 10 CEOs are already posting content on company websites. Yet only 18 per cent of the CEOs surveyed participated on social networks. The chart above gives an overview of the survey findings. Interstingly, 80% of staff want to see their CEOs on social media, largely because it's where they want to keep up to date.

I feel most CEOs I talk to are missing this powerful opportunity to spread the truth about their business vision. Social media is where these truths are shared and discussed, it's one place the leader can champion their cause with passion.

What makes mid-sized businesses more profitable than big?

So what is a mid-sized business?

GE Capital has been defining the mid market in Australia as businesses that have annual revenues of between A$10 million and A$250 million. Average firm turnover is about A$41 million. Despite comprising just 1.4% of companies by number, mid-market firms provide one in four full-time jobs and contribute A$425 billion annually to the economy.

The federal Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, which has a broader definition of medium-sized businesses as those with between 20 and 199 employees, puts the economic contribution of the mid-market considerably higher.

The mid-market campaign we successfully managed over four years for IBM targeted businesses from 99 and right up to 999, the large corporate and government sectors that IBM traditionally owned really kick in around 1,000 staff.

Australian Business

Most mangers still hold the belief big means better. We hold a belief businesses can only succeed today by being nimble. The reason for this is the profound change the Internet has brought to our lives. The world even quite recently was quite slow to change, and most businesses were relatively simple. Today we all compete in a world of rapid paced change and increasing complexity. So the old big business model of slowly and effectively finding savings from gradual improvements to products and services and small efficiency gains in management and procurement are no longer enough to stay competitive. Let alone stay in business.

The evidence for the decline in profitability of big business is seen in this chart. It shows one third of market leaders in their category in 1950 were also the most profitable businesses in their category, whereas today being big almost guarantees you’ll be struggling to make a buck.

Market leaders that are also category profit leaders:

What makes big business vulnerable to challenger brands

George Shinkle is a Lecturer in the School of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at the Australian School of Business. He has been studying why big business is failing.

“Organisations grow large by becoming more efficient, so when you’re really focusing on efficiency you typically become less and less flexible. The rules and processes and procedures become more and more about keeping you efficient, constraining your ability to be flexible,” he says.

“If you talk to the CEO of a very large firm, they don’t feel as if they’ve got direct control of what the organisation’s really doing. They give guidance and they set policy but the organisation has some variance on how well they follow those things,” says Shinkle.

The learning you can take advantage of is that managers in large companies try to hide from change. Which is why, if you’re running a mid-market business, you will create your own advantage by actively seeking out things to change to differentiate from the competition.

Not too big, not too small, mid-sized business is just right

Big business is still obsessed with conformity, groupthink and doing things the way they have always been done around here. Small businesses may be the birthplace of great ideas, but they usually don’t have the scale or resources to commercialise those insights.

The mid-sized business is perfectly placed in the middle, where the distance between innovative thinkers and management that can actually make decisions is short. Unlike small business, resources aren’t so slim ideas can’t be trialled without damaging the existing business of running the business.

At a CEO Institute meeting Susan Lenehan told me the biggest frustration of the CEOs of Australian arms of global businesses she mentors is their total lack of autonomy. They are prescribed what to do by head office irrespective of local circumstances. In her words, it’s the pinnacle of the “bully culture” of big business management.

Challenger brands will prosper by taking risks

This is the great opportunity mid-sized Australian businesses are exploiting, they can leverage their ability to try changes, while the big guys are stuck in the inertia of business as usual, with its five year plans, annual targets and quarterly reporting. By challenging traditional big brands, Australians can be globally competitive in a world that is changing daily.

The real successes come from maximising returns by minimising the risks of change – we developed the challenger brand formula for growth for this very reason.

Why you need brand awareness before sales

This famous ad for advertising with McGraw Hill appeared in 1958

Business owners sometimes need reminding of the timeless challenge, why would a prospect buy from you rather than one of your competitors?

For 50 years the simple answer was to spend more on advertising than the rest of your category. As marketers now realise, simple strategies in this Internet enabled world now require more complex solutions.

Challenger brands can succeed today without big ad budgets

The good news is smaller businesses can now be successful challenger brands with smaller budgets than the big brands. The staring point is to differentiate. with a singleminded story that prospects will value. you can then apply a test and learn approach to marketing across multiple mediums. Smarter strategies applied with insight will now succeed while big spending inflexible brands continue to struggle.

73% of marketers say more has changed in 2 years than the past 50

Who are you going to call to advise your business on how to grasp the rapidly expanding number of marketing communications options? Usually you’d call in an expert. However, the pace of change right across the business world and the complexity of competing solutions is so great how can any individual be an expert? And big businesses may have lots of individuals, but we all know they rarely work as a team let alone communicate well with clients.

Marketing professionals are confused

A survey* by Adobe of 1000 marketers in the US shows the crisis in confidence of the marketing services.

“Marketers are facing a dilemma: they aren’t sure what’s working, they’re feeling under-equipped to meet the challenges of digital, and they’re having a tough time keeping up with the pace of change in the industry. What’s worse, no one hands you a playbook on how to make it all work,” says Ann Lewnes, Chief Marketing Officer, Adobe.

Digital marketing is full of novices

Adobe’s survey found less than half (48%) of marketers who consider themselves primarily digital specialists feel highly proficient in digital marketing. Most digital marketers haven’t had any formal training in digital marketing. No surprise really, it’s so new and evolving very few places can teach it.

The problem for business owners is how to leverage what’s new when so few people, if indeed any, know what will work. The people whose job it is to know, professional marketers, revealed in the survey the same old issues are today’s top challenges. 82% cited reaching their customers as the biggest challenge, then the uncertainty of knowing if their campaigns are working (79%), and measuring campaign effectiveness (77%) and marketing ROI (75%).

The answer for marketing your business?

Today every part of the business has to take risks

Whether it’s your accounting systems, distribution, IT or marketing, everything now is facing change. It’s hard enough to know the right question to ask anymore, let alone have the right answer. The safest option today is counterintuitive – it’s to realise you can’t predict winners anymore.

So the safe approach with marketing is no longer to set and forget. Rather than taking a long time and spending a lot of money attempting to develop the one perfect solution, try a lot ideas and mediums. And try them quickly and often.

Test. Learn. Adjust. Test again.

Learn to feel comfortable with failures. Set out to make the risks small so the stakes aren’t too high. Then go for it with a test and learn approach to marketing. The more often you fail the quicker you’ll find yourself challenging the competition and being successful.

* Source: Adobe and Edelman Berland, online survey among a total of 1000 US marketers.  Marketing Staff (n=499), Marketing Decision Makers (n=436), Digital Marketers (n=263), and Marketing Generalists (n=754). September 2013

Are fashion retailers training customers to buy on sale?

I've written in the past how Zara led the world by applying just-in-time manufacturing and data analytics to bring us fashion forward product design. This has given them an advantage over traditional retailers by circumventing the traditional seasonal approach to fashion.

Instead of waiting for the leading designers to reveal on the Paris catwalks what we'll be wearing next year, Zara's innovation was to take the Dell Computer model. Zara replenishes stock in their stores every week, see what sells, then make more of what is popular. Rather than sitting on large quantities of stock hoping people will like what style you've backed, Zara take a test and learn approach. They never back one colour or style for a full season, Zara simply adjusts what they manufacture on the fly to what the consumer wants this week.

Fashion challenger brands risk destroying the advantage they have created

Retailers are losing the power to maintain margins by encouraging a buy on sale mentality. According to Robin Givhan, the only clothes critic to win a Pulitzer Prize, with the constant turnover and turnout of items due to the ever-quickening fashion cycle, there’s no need to buy anything at full price anymore.

While bloggers and fashion critics have used social media to drive awareness and demand of the weekly fashion cycle, retailers she says are to blame for the loss of their pricing power.

"Retailers talk a lot about how the availability of show images pique the interest of consumers before the clothes are available. But I blame retailers for creating a system in which they want spring clothes in November and more shipments every five second[s] and then putting things on sale when they've only been on the racks for one second," said Givhan.

Consumers usually don't know how to establish the value of something, it's actually within the power of the seller to frame the price that they will believe is fair.

Innovate for pricing advantage

If you have innovated your way to a price advantage, don't throw away your smartly won margin. Instead, decide how you can frame the price as fair value, for instance in terms of more for the same, or faster for the same, or better for the same. Offering something for less is an approach fashion retailers are finding comes at the cost of not just profit, but long term survival.

Don't drive your category to the bottom the way Persian Rug stores have, where in every corner of the world the SALE sign on the window now means OPEN. Here's one I snapped in Hong Kong...

Do you have a clear point of difference to drive growth?

Staying in business has never been harder. 10,632 companies collapsed in the 12 months to March 1 2013 -  ASIC also reports the number of firms being placed in administration is more than 12 per cent higher than during the GFC. Over the last few months an average of 44 small businesses were closing every day according to ABS data.

A change of government won’t change the fact the pace of change is still accelerating, the choices for customers continue growing and the decisions we all face in life are more complex than ever.

Where will your business growth come from?

These are your options:

1. From existing clients
2. By getting new clients
3. Expanding to new locations, (interstate, overseas)
4. Developing new services
5. Making acquisitions

90% of businesses focus on number 1, selling more to current customers or charging them more. Yet the upside is limited.

Of the small number that go down the acquisition path most are disappointed. An AGSM survey of mergers and acquisitions showed after 3 years just 10% exceeded expectations of synergy and only 10% - 15% met expectations. The rest had failed or were in a death spiral.

Expansion and new product or service development often require a large commitment of resources and takes attention away from the existing business.

Which leaves new business as the key driver of growth. Marketing is the one proven method that can drive scalable new business growth. A successful new business program begins by confirming you have a differentiated offer relevant to today’s customer. Every prospective customer has more than one choice. What does your business have that makes it so special they have to choose you?

Customer alignment, simplification and innovation

Here’s a simple technique that GE Capital employs to keep their business differentiated in this time of rapid change.

Customer aligned

• Employees know which customer segments we serve and what their top 3 needs are
• Our organisation rallies around these needs (customer facing & support departments)
• We continuously track customer metrics at a transaction, product and business level
• We respond to customer feedback fast

Simple

• We do less, better
• Our customer processes are intuitive
• Our internal processes are as easy as our customer processes
• We routinely identify and eliminate the bottom 30% flow value processes, reporting and meetings

Innovative

• We encourage, empower and reward staff who challenge the status quo
• We launch new ideas fast (< 45 days average)
• We have a full pipeline of ideas linked to incremental volume
• We invest a significant amount annually on innovation

Differentiation for new business growth

Don’t hold your breath waiting for the government to simplify regulation, align their policies with your needs or innovate the country’s way to prosperity. Look at your current structure, reconsider what the business currently offers and determine a positioning that will differentiate you from your competition. Today.

This is just one of the tools UNO uses to ensure when our challenger brand clients invest in marketing, the returns will be worth the effort.

Two fast food brands prove the long term value of a challenger positioning

There are few categories more sophisticated at marketing than fast food. For 50 years McDonalds has been fine-tuning their brand marketing driven machine in Australia. Other brands may talk share of voice or share of wallet, McDonalds is famous for wanting the largest share of stomach in the country.

The business is a great example of how to upsell, cross sell and find new reasons for customers to visit. From breakfast muffins through burgers and happy meals to soft serves and late night treats, washed down by McCafe coffees in between. From Pasta Zu to chicken nuggets to who knows what else a machine can transform animal castoffs into.

Want fries with that?

All of these tactics are an excuse to get more people to buy fries more often, it's where the big profits are made. Makes you wonder how anyone can compete? If you don't work for an omnipotent  global business there is evidence of hope. Roy Morgan reasearch released in August 2013 shows just how well new competitors can do by choosing to take a challenger brand positioning.

A case study in how positioning can outsmart the big brands

Hungry Jacks came much later, and has never had the footprint or the ad budget to compete head on. What has worked long term for Jack Cowin's fast food challenger up against a global heavyweight, is a differentiated positioning that gives it a clearly defined space to compete in. "The burgers are better at Hungry Jacks."

From day one they lived up to that positioning statement, better burgers; either with biigger burger patties, actual lettuce instead of a miserable pickled cucumber, to the first Angus beef burger, then bacon and now organic beef. Single mindedly niche focused, and better for it in the minds of customers, who consistently rank Hungry Jacks above Maccas.

Long-term customer satisfaction in fast food comes from smart positioning. Chart: Roy Morgan, August 2013 

Challenger brands create new terms to compete on

Subway shows the rewards of zigging when the competition zags. While fast food leaders spent their product and promotion strategies on short term price promotion or new themes, from changing with the seasons, think summer pineapple burgers to following fashions, think cajun sauce. Meanwhile Subway went where no fast food had ever successfully gone before: the good for you. positioning.

The chart shows the relative strength of Burger King's "do less of the same, better" approach, and Subway's "do something completely different" model. Both are positively recognised by the consumer and continue to command a price premium to the slower to innovate fast food competition.

What size is a typical marketing budget?

How much is the right amount to invest in marketing?

Depends who you ask. The CMO Council asked hundreds of chief marketing officers around the world across categories how big their budgets are. While this was post GFC, it gives us a useful benchmark when planning ahead.

The starting point for setting a budget uses a top down approach based on your revenue. The chart we've made below shows the percentage of revenue invested in marketing by business to business firms.

Percentage of revenue invested in B2B marketing
2010 CMO Council Survey

Interestingly, the consensus view amongst those surveyed was that a new brand launch required a minimum investment of 20% of revenue. As we can see from the chart, either there aren't many new brands launched in any year, or the majority aren't spending enough to ensure they don't fail.

Another way of determining the right size of budget is to compare how much is spent according to the size of the business.

Percentage of revenue invested in marketing by company size
2010 CMO Council Survey

We shouldn't be surprised that as businesses establish themselves and grow, the number of staff grows. As they grow, the relative proportion of their revenue invested in marketing decreases. Marketers understand the long term nature of judging the return on investiment in marketing. Marketing that is consistant delivers compounding returns, a relatively large initial spend will pay dividends in the long term.

Average marketing budget for FMCG brands

A Go-to-Market survey in 2012 found this spread of investment by revenue of FMCG brands:

% of revenue % of companies

No budget    1.1%

0 - 2%           28.6%

3 - 5%           33%

6 - 10%         21.1%

11 - 15%        8.6%

16 - 20%        4.3%

20%+             3.2%

You can use these percentages as a starting point for framing your marketing budget and then compare to the result of viewing your requirements from a bottom up view.

Bottom up marketing budget approach

Create a list of activities you plan to undertake across your integrated marcomms plan and estimate the required investments for each. Balance and adjust for frequency, reach and coverage. Consider set-up costs for all mediums and a realistic figure for content creation and creative, remembering the better the idea the less times your audience needs to see it to get a result. Factor in research and tracking and an allowance to have the flexibility to react and respond. Remember to allocate around half your total budget for labour, across both internal and outsourced agencies for development and management throughout the year.

Depending on the particular segment your brand is in, the consensus is a B2B marcomms budget needs to be between 3 and 6% of revenue and for FMCG between 6 and 12% to have at least a competitive share of voice.

The most and least trusted professions

Every year Roy Morgan releases a ranking of the trust Australians have for each of the professions. Advertising is down and real estate salesmen up in 2013.

Here are the jobs as they rank for trust in Australia

How does this compare on a global basis? See the global trust index.

The Naked truth on Rudd's interview for ads scandal

You probably already have an inkling the public rate marketers and ad people at the bottom of the trust scale for professions. You're right, they are down there with politicians. Something happened this week to reinforce the view that neither can be trusted, it's a classic example of an "whatever it takes who cares about the ethics" attitude.

Controversy blew up when Sydney based Naked Communications was exposed while working on a project for Labor when it offered video interviews with PM Kevin Rudd to online youth publishers in return for free online ad space.

Further blurring the lines between “an interview”, and an ad campaign, the agency wrote to Faifax owned The Vine they were “particularly keen for a deeper relationship (including putting investment behind your content on YouTube).”

They also encouraged the online publication to provide “access to pro-Labor or pro-NBN talent.”

When found with their pants down, Naked were fired by Labor. The Sydney Morning Herald’s political reporter, Jonathan Swan, who broke the story, said “it seemed very odd” that Labor was oblivious to the deals offered to online youth sites.

The agency’s CEO claimed no knowledge of the deal, blaming a younger staff member. Indeed, the day after it blew up the agency planner responsible was “no longer in the building”, having left for a holiday in the UK.

What has been adland's reponse to this question of maintaining standards?

Next day the Creative Director of Wonder wrote in AdNews “how much responsibility are we giving young and inexperienced executives? I think too much. Our industry is more impressed by 20-something backward baseball cap-wearing gamers that impress us with their social media savvy than wise old owls. Where are our wise old owls? Nobody could ever accuse the marketing industry as one that eats their young. Quite the opposite, we assassinate the old and we call anyone over 50 old. Mike Wilson (CEO) is Naked’s wise old owl and the bloke is only in his 40s.”

He then suggested the team at Naked vote Abbott to avoid a Labor backlash. This received some wise comments, my favourite from No Wonder of Paddington:

"Wisdom is not the province of age, and this is not an 'odd judgement error'. It's a failure from top down to create a culture of ethics... that at all times forces doing the right thing to trump making a splash for your client. Wilson may be the straight shooter he's characterised here to be, but as the leader of the pack, he's ultimately responsible for the culture that would spawn the actions of that 'rogue executive' who was shown the door"

"This isn't the first time that Naked has been guilty of pushing the envelope at the expense of common sense, and more importantly common decency. What's worse is that the creative drive to market at any expense has had a poisonous influence on the business in general, and in some corners legitimised the art of the stunt and the bad habit of erasing the moral line to such an extent that many of the young guns don't even know it exists."

"It's the agency that should take the fall in the end, not just the employee directly responsible, and encouraging them to vote for Abbott in an attempt to avoid the negative reaction from everyone that they richly deserve shows us all just how jaded the industry at large has become. Sad and sadder."

SMH's Swan labeled the agency “a bit wild west, they’ve got a cowboy reputation” and said they have a history of “doing things a bit off-piste”. Swan also mentioned the infamous fake Facebook Witchery coat campaign which duped both mainstream media and social media users in 2009. 

When does online content become advertising?

According to the ACCC and AANA it’s one and the same in the eyes of the law, as we can see from the new Code on marketing communications that encompases social media.

Gabriel McDowell, MD of PR firm Res Publica pointed out the new risks inherent in attempting to leverage digital channels: “From a crisis management perspective, and based on the reported facts so far, I think the ALP has reacted promptly and appropriately to try to limit reputational damage to the Labor brand. They have made it clear they didn’t sanction the offending proposal and firing the responsible agency was a justifiable response given the seriousness of its misjudgement.

"And there can be no doubt that it is a whopper of a misjudgement because building trust and understanding between a brand and its public is the fundamental objective of any communication campaign and deliberately blurring the lines between editorial and advertising can only erode trust when it is uncovered.”

"It has never happened before. My mouth was on the ground. Young people are politically engaged and this is not the way to go about appealing to them. It is why we tend to shy away from the major parties."

She told AdNews it was "exactly the sort of thing that is killing media", but that brands generally grasped the value of editorial over paid content.

The challenge for the communications industry is while we may have self-regulation, only a handful of agencies are Accredited by the Communications Council. UNO is, Naked isn't and most clients don't appreciate the difference. As I commented to AdNews, "what's the point of having an agency Accreditation scheme when people arrive at work having forgotten to pack the moral compass. If we want to be regarded higher than real estate salesmen, which the latest research shows we don't, both clients and agencies need to keep briefs away from the irresponsible."

Will digital spell the end of editorial integrity?

This has all happened less than a week after Adnews editor-in-chief Paul McIntyre expressed a fear for the future of publishing as the title becomes a defacto re-publisher of PR releases and sponsored events. This is what he said in an open editorial:

"Change can be painful but equally stimulating. Just as long the industry knows where it’s all headed and in what direction it is pushing its industry media. It won’t be too far away, for example, when you all can hack back your budget for PR operatives. And PR types, brace for a much harder slog. Seriously, most of you won’t be needed. The deluge of PR-generated ideas and story angles is rising rapidly while the ability for business-to-business media to cover it is declining at the same pace. Don’t forget that. Okay, sorry, rant over."