The Times
Users of the Daily Mail's news apps comprise 3 million, or barely 1 percent, of MailOnline's 226 million monthly unique browsers, but are responsible for 42% of the time that readers spend looking at the world's most popular English-language online newspaper. One-third of app users visit daily via a smartphone or a tablet. By contrast, fewer than one in ten of the monthly browsers click on to stories on the free Web site each day -- just over half via mobile devices and the remainder on desktop computers.
Marketing Week
Speaking at the J.P. Morgan global technology, media and telecom conference on Wednesday, Twitter CFO Anthony Noto confirmed he is now in charge of marketing. He said the decision was made to "elevate the importance of marketing" at board level and make it a "key component of everything we do" and that "marketing really needs to permeate product, it needs to permeate content and it needs to permeate media."
Press Gazette
The BBC claims to reach a record 308m people a week across the world after changing the way it counts its audience. The corporation now includes entertainment content, Facebook and YouTube views as well as BBC News usage in its estimate. Its public aim is to have a global reach of 500m people by 2022. On this day last year, a report commissioned by head of BBC News James Harding and written by Sir Howard Stringer suggested that the corporation was "punching well below its weight in the digital world."
Campaign
Diageo and Bartle Bogle Hegarty have ended their 15-year relationship, as the Baileys and Gordon's accounts move in-house. This comes five months after BBH lost the global account for Diageo's whisky brand Johnnie Walker to Anomaly. In a statement Diageo said the brand activity for Baileys and Gordon's will be handled in-house for the next 12 months and the work will not be put out to pitch.
Campaign
UK Trade & Investment, the government body, has appointed Engine to handle its creative advertising. Engine will lead the creative for UKTI and will also work on the "Great Britain" campaign, which promotes British interests abroad. The initiative is funded by several government bodies alongside UKTI, including the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, Visit Britain, British Council and Number 10. Engine could also be asked to create work for these partners if required. The pitches took place two weeks ago.
Media Week
BBC radio has scraped an upturn in its overall weekly audience reach in the first quarter of 2015, while commercial radio suffered a decline during the same period. The latest Rajar audience listening figures for the three months to 5 April 2015 show a total of 34,872,000 people tuned into BBC radio, up slightly by 0.2 percent on the previous quarter. The rise sets the BBC slightly apart from commercial radio, which experienced a 1.3 percent dip in listening down to an audience of 33,916,000 over the last quarter.
The Drum
The Direct Marketing Association (DMA) and the Institute of Direct and Digital Marketing (IDM) have announced a merger to create one leading body in the one-to-one marketing industry. Led by CEO Chris Combemale, the DMA and IDM will continue to operate as individual brands as the combined business aims to protect and grow the industry. According to the firms, the new organisation will be the largest marketing trade body in Europe, serving a GBP14.2 billion industry with a workforce of over 530,000 people.
Press Gazette
New press regulator IMPRESS has revealed that it is applying for official recognition under the Parliament-backed Royal Charter process. It is a move that paves the way for all publishers who aren't members of IMPRESS to pay both sides costs in libel and privacy cases even if they win. Currently IMPRESS has yet to sign up any members. Under the Crime and Courts Act 2013 publishers who are not members of a Royal Charter-backed press regulator face the threat of exemplary damages in privacy and libel cases.
The Guardian
Spotify moved to expand its service beyond music on Wednesday, announcing video content deals with several major media conglomerates, including Comedy Central, ESPN, Adult Swim, BBC and NBC. The video content will be short-form and many of the producers will also distribute podcasts over the service. The new Spotify debuts today in the U.S., UK, Germany and Sweden and will expand further.
Marketing Week
Marks & Spencer has said it will improve personalisation on its Web site to offer customers individual product recommendations, advice and inspiration. M&S relaunched its Web site a year ago to focus more on content and publishing but has struggled with sales, as customers complained the new site was more complex. Sales at M&S.com remained in decline for the year to 28 March -- with sales falling 2%. However, its performance improved throughout the year, with sales up 13.8% in Q4.