Former client, Ctrl-Shift, is a strategy consultancy focusing on personal data and its use online. They realised that the landscape of personal data availability online has changed hugely in a very short time and despite hysterical outcries about Facebook privacy settings, it is an important area that both brands and consumers should be knowledgable about. [...]








Rob Lane my colleague recently wrote a first draft of a new proposal for a client brand and I was delighted that he chose to insert a new section header, “Your responsibilities”. Imagine an agency telling a prospective client – not one we’re working with already – that they had to actively participate in delivering [...]








We had a deep Discussion with Julian Darley, a client who runs Makin Movies- a consultancy, blog and shop for low budget movie making. Golden questions are a way to uncover more information from a discussion than your prospect is aware.  See our other blog posts on the topic in the categories list on right [...]








One of the buzz marketing phrases doing the rounds is “Inbound Marketing”  and we find that many brands and businsses hope inbound marketing will fulfil all their hopes for new enquiries and drive up the sales funnel effortlessly. It doesn’t work like that. There certainly are many agencies who sell themselves as inbound or content marketing specialists. [...]








Ben Wightman is a senior PPC specialist with Latitude Group.  We first heard him on the Digital Marketing Podcast – Ben has written a report for Latitude every quarter for the past 2 years about mobile marketing.  Ben kindly skyped an interview with us about the report: How did you end up working in an [...]








Recently I’ve become very conscious of images as part of the brand mix online and offline.  There are brands who create visual icons – take a look at my ‘Marmite’ Pinterest board created for a client celebrating the fact that New Zealand has run out of Marmite(!)- true story. And so I think we’ve changed [...]








Migrating your marketing online and integrating new elements of social media into a traditional brand strategy is not easy.  Today we showcase a client and their challenges and a book and a blog post.  Together they give you the one principle you need to write a B2B online brand strategy. How to get customer community integrated into your [...]








Robert Rosenthal posted this in his Facebook Group; How would you address this tricky database marketing challenge? A B2B marketer relies heavily on postal mail to promote their offerings. They use email marketing but have yet to see results strong enough to justify a reduced reliance on the Postal Service. Each purchase secured via postal [...]








We’ve met two companies recently who are retailers and trying to expand their business with new outlets and distribution channels but having some difficulties finding the right places to go to. Here’s some ideas of ways to get over this barrier by appealing to your existing customerbase.  They know you, they know your brand and [...]








The news this week has been crazy about Disney’s apparent flop in their recent release of the movie John Carter. It’s rare for a class act like Disney to get a project like this so badly wrong.  We spoke to low budget movie blogger and Client of Creative Agency Secrets, Julian Darley about why he [...]