Ben Foster

Did you know 45% of people say they are more likely to notice a catalogue sent in the post than a marketing email? If you're in the planning phase for your Christmas activity take a moment, grab a cup of tea and discover more fascinating more stats and benefits for catalogues in our blog. ➡️

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I read this response from the UK's Affiliate Performance Marketing Association website recently, about the ICO's call for views on Consent to Pay. It made for an interesting read and is something affiliate marketers really do need to keep abreast of as privacy and consent changes are taking place at different levels around the world. Take a look at the overall response here and let me know what are your thoughts? https://lnkd.in/gi9RR9Pw

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🚨 Tomorrow starts one of (if not THE) busiest time of the year shoppers AND advertisers alike! 🚨 This week coming isn’t just about queues outside Curry’s or scoring a 70% discount on that air fryer you’ll never use – it’s a serious moment for brands, freelancers and agencies alike. With people expected to spend billions tomorrow, the opportunity to drive revenue and conversions is enormous. 💸 At Catalyst we’re pulling out all the stops to make sure our clients don’t just ride the Black Friday wave – they own it. Here's how: 🎨 Naming Conventions FTW We’re tracking creative performance in real time using ultra-specific naming conventions (NCs). Why? It keeps us laser-focused on which ads are smashing it and which ones need the bin – fast. 📉 Churn, Baby, Churn We’ve tightened our creative churn guidelines. If something isn’t delivering the goods, it’s gone quicker than a Black Friday iPhone deal. The result? Fresh, high-performing ads on rotation. 🎯 Retargeting Royalty We’ve cranked up retargeting efforts to 11. More than our usual setup, this hyper-focus ensures those engaged-but-undecided customers get that little nudge they need to convert. Tomorrow begins a crazy week, and we’re here for it! To all the fellow advertisers out there: may your ROAS be high, your CPCs be low, and your stock levels... well, good luck with that. 😉

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Did you think the UK's programmatic DOOH market was big enough at 29% of all campaigns? Think again! The market is expected to continue to grow over the next 18 months, with adoption set to rise to a whopping 36%!! 😱 This impressive growth is a testament to the medium's ability to revolutionise campaigns and leave an impact that actually matters. Not tried it yet? Give our team a shout to get started. #ProgrammaticDOOH #DOOHTrends #CreativeAgency #DigitalOutOfHome #AdvertisingAgency

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OOH advertising has long been celebrated for its unmatched ability to drive brand awareness—and that holds true today. But with the evolution of OOH—and Programmatic OOH emerging as a powerful option within the broader OOH landscape—there’s now an even greater opportunity. Leveraging granular data from diverse sources, Programmatic OOH empowers brands not only to reach audiences but to drive (and measure!!!) key middle- and lower-funnel metrics like consideration and purchase intent. In some cases, Programmatic OOH is the ideal channel for driving lower-funnel outcomes such as sales, especially when location is critical. By combining an audience-first approach with strategic-location placement, campaigns can achieve maximum efficiency and impact. The final step? Providing clients with holistically planned media strategies that align all programmatic channels, amplifying both efficiency and impact. What role do you see Programmatic OOH playing on your next media plan? #ProgrammaticOOH

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Reading ITV's latest press release the following phrase struck me: 'It (Planet V) is now the exclusive entry point for ITVX advertising, and handles over 99% of ITV’s digital ad bookings.' I have always championed self-serve ad platforms, having cut my teeth in the #Native space where self-serve was the norm, I then encountered the beast that is Meta’s ad platform. Both allowed #SME’s to flourish in the digital world where their smaller budgets often go unnoticed. There is a reason why some of the biggest #advertising businesses in the world offer self-serve and #ITV has tapped into that with an incredible £1bn in ad booking revenue in its first 4 years. Well done ITV! https://lnkd.in/eZAPvxqC.

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UKOM data from Ipsos iris shows how TikTok's UK audience growth remains strong, now driven by audiences older than you might expect. IPA (Institute of Practitioners in Advertising) ISBA AOP Association of Online Publishers IAB UK Ipsos UK #mediaplanning #datainsight #standardsmatter

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Privacy regulation. Cookie deprecation. ID signal loss. It's a complicated time to be working in programmatic with a seriously shifting landscape. Clear Channel UK spoke to 10 industry figures at the coalface of programmatic DOOH about the benefits marketers are seeing in their approach for adding the channel to their digital strategies. From Cookies to Cohorts in Context, a free new report with expert analysis is out now 👇 https://okt.to/MRFT2t

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We don't learn from exceptions: so speculating on Jaguar's strategy won't generate insight for us. We do learn from repeated data patterns. And Jaguar's brand metrics shows a pattern we have seen regularly before: an initial loss of difference, followed by other perceptions. This pattern is consistently predictive of one of two outcomes: commodification, or death. #KantarBrandZ

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One of the key facets of search in AI Overviews and regular SERPs: more personalisation. I'm seeing more and more of these 'You visit often' labels on Google Search Results in the UK. - Purpose: Highlights websites frequently visited by users. - Benefit: Makes it easier for users to find their preferred sites quickly. - Rollout: Began in December 2023 in the US, but now in the UK? - Goal: Enhances personalised search experience by prioritising frequently visited sites in search snippets.

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The good news keeps coming… A bit more detail on the great results achieved through our Organic strategy which bagged a Best Use of Search award at the UK Search Awards last week. 2025 looks set to be an even more exciting year as we look to roll out even more award-winning work across even more brands. We have some availability for additional brands looking for SEO and Digital PR support, please get in touch with myself or George H M Webb for more information. #SEO #Organic #PerformanceMarketing #DigitalPR #Search #UKSearchAwards

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Pret's subscription model wasn't about loyalty, it was about customer acquisition 🫴 I keep seeing Pret's £30 a month subscription referred to as a loyalty scheme; including in their own financial reports. Now, with their latest move to change it up there's a sense that this was a failed loyalty scheme. But if I flip it on its head, I see it as one giant sampling campaign, partly invested in by the UK population! If you want to get people to pay money for something that they're not quite sure on the quality, value, taste, then one of the ways to get it into their hands is to offer it to them for free or at a low price. And if you want them to continue enjoying your product regularly, you can aim to create a habit around your product. You could do this by giving away lots of your product around the same time every day to embed this ritual into your customers' lives. Brands are leaky buckets, and following the pandemic Pret had a mostly empty bucket! To grow, brands need to aim for light buyers, and continuously bring more people in to your brand than your competitors. I see Pret as looking to get a competitive advantage over other coffee shops by getting competitors' customers to make the switch to Pret, thus stealing market share. When they make the switch to their cheaper subscription but with less 'payback', I imagine there's an assumption that all these 'loyal' customers are so invested in Pret that they'll continue to visit and buy. Yet coffee is a commodity. People will generally go to the coffee shop closest to them in their moment of need! Unless Pret has coffee filled with magic, there's very little reason to choose one coffee chain over another. But, I'm optimistic. I imagine Pret will keep plenty of customers, many of whom were not Pret customers before, because of a successful initiative in driving trial. And if I'd like one thing to come out of this, I'd love to see the next financial report refer to this subscription as a customer acquisition strategy, not a loyalty one 😉

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FACT! Data heavy digital pr campaigns achieving highly relevant links are out of reach of most freelancers and smaller agencies who do not have inhouse access to data teams... Right? Not any more. Reboot is proud to announce our new Data Marketing service. Designed to make large scale stand alone data driven digital pr campaigns accessible to EVERYONE. Our 8 strong PHD level data scientists are one of the largest in the industry and trusted by the biggest brands around the globe and we are, for the first time, making this important resource available to everyone. Over the years we have developed our data infrastructure to build our campaigns around. We have built a comprehensive data repository and expertise in building robust data scrapers, using LLMs (or AI) for powering sentiment analysis and classification, geospatial data analysis and leading forecasting and analytics techniques to get the most out of data and now we would like you to have access to those expertise to really take your campaigns to the next level. So next time your client wants something a little more impactful than search volume or instagramable based campaigns, arrange some time to chat to Paul Lapham who will be happy to discuss your needs in more detail. This announcement is only the first of a series of offerings planned to help support freelancers and give them an edge in what is an incredibly competitive niche. Look out for some more major announcements very soon! #digitalpr #seo #linkbuilding #data #marketing

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A few thoughts kindly featured by Performance Marketing World regarding the IPA (Institute of Practitioners in Advertising) Bellwether Report which gives plenty of reason for optimism 🚀 It’s great to see in the latest IPA Bellwether Report that UK marketing budgets are growing again after the recent economic downturn, which saw nearly half (45%) of businesses changing their marketing priorities according to Acxiom UK research. Data intelligence-led marketing strategies are what give brands the competitive edge they need to maintain customer trust and ultimately feed a businesses bottom-line, but it takes both smart investment and strategy. In today’s hyperconnected world, people interact in real time with brands through multiple offline and online channels, expecting highly personalised and connected experiences with brands that are aligned to their interests and values. In fact, nearly half (47%) of the people surveyed by Acxiom said they are more likely to click on an advert or email if it contains personalised content. These interactions form a priceless cache of data which, with the right investment in tools and talent, can be leveraged to gain valuable insights, create a meaningful customer journey and improve speed to revenue. So for the majority of brands that are yet to truly realise the full value of their customer data, this uptick in marketing budgets should be the trigger to evaluate their customer intelligence strategy to fully maximise marketing ROI. #marketing #customerintelligence #adspend #data #IPABellwether https://lnkd.in/eP9QRMag

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A Game-Changing Moment for Marketers Everywhere. I’m incredibly proud to share that Convertr will be making an unprecedented £9M+ investment to take lead management and data quality to unprecedented heights. For too long, businesses have accepted poor data as an inevitability, wasting trillions every year on inefficiencies. At Convertr, we say: no more. With this investment, we’re not just launching AI Fraud Detection and a host of other innovative features – we’re raising the bar for the entire industry. We’re giving marketers the tools they need to ensure their data is reliable, actionable, and ready to drive real results. A huge thank you to our team and our clients for trusting us to help lead this revolution. The future of marketing is here, and it’s all about validated, intelligent data. https://lnkd.in/eYfFeCBw #LeadManagement #DataIntegrity #MarketingInnovation #AI

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The GDMA recently released their international benchmark report for email (based on a roll up of the whole of 2023) which I thought could be interesting to share for all those marketers and business owners in my network that are involved in email. Link is here if it is helpful to anyone - https://lnkd.in/ex2sksM6

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Impact is our output. We talk about modern marketing being able to deliver two types of impact - cultural and commercial. How do we move beyond the brand purpose debate and into a more grown up and nuanced conversation about the different types of impact we all create as marketers every day? Come and join us to find out.

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Last touch attribution is like Tesco having doors 👇 Genuinely one of the best analogies i've ever read on the problems of last touch attribution. I think the first time i read it was on 'How Not To Plan' a few years ago, authored by Les Binet and sarah carter and published by the APG. Anyway, fast forward and i also did my IPA (Institute of Practitioners in Advertising) effectiveness test in 2023. Learned a ton. Made lots of notes. And then kinda left them there. But if you know me, i like to share everything i learn. So i wrote about how the top 1% brands think about measurement, with practical things that definitely helped me wrap my head around all of it (or at least be less shit about it). And i genuinely had fun with this, because measurement can be fun (what!), or if nothing else it's crucial for us to be actually taken seriously by the wider business, not just other marketers. I'm sending a newsletter about it next week. The measurement piece is already live, but if you subscribe to Salmon Theory, you'll get that, other short sharp pieces, and a chance to access our private group: https://lnkd.in/dcBmJhnZ

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