Fancy a coffee?

If you do, make sure you head to a Starbucks or Costa Coffee! Next week they have teamed together along with Caffe Nero and Marks and Spencer in a marketing campaign to raise money for Project Waterfall, a charity that raises money in order to deliver clean water to African coffee-supplying countries.

From April the 4th these high street giants will put aside their competitive spirit in order to spend more time marketing the campaign which takes place during national Coffee Week.

If you go and get a coffee you will be asked if you would like to add an extra 5p which will go straight to the charity.

This is a fantastic cause and I think it gives the coffee chains an opportunity to market themselves in a very different and innovative way.

Internet Advertising

According to a new report, a quarter of the entire spend on advertising in the UK is now spent on internet advertising.


For the full story, head to - BBC NEWS

Image credit: http://www.connect-web-solutions.co.uk

TED

Dan Cobley is the Marketing Director at Google - check him out here on TED giving a talk entitled "What physics taught me about marketing"

TED is a non-profit organisation with the moto "Ideas Worth Spreading" The innovative thinking and passion held by the speakers is for me what makes it such a useful and inspirational tool.

Photoshop: If at first you don't succeed, thank goodness for online tutorials

Learning Photoshop can be distressing. Yes, it really can be. But to get that dream job in Marketing it turns out that it's not something to be sniffed at.

Here are some online tutorials to help you along your way. Tried and tested by myself, the once novice, the now part novice.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqD851MIWVo&feature=related

The next series of tutorials are really informative if a bit tongue in cheek - 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_X5uR7VC4M

And finally, a great tutorial on poster making with Photoshop - 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hu3HLqDe4-I

Facebook: it's not just for procrastination

I have a definite love/hate relationship with Facebook. Sometimes, I think I just love to hate it. I must admit though, it has become a big part of my life with many social events being orchestrated via the wonders of the event application and even more so for the simple fact that I can just keep up to date with all my lovely (real!) friends around the country and even more importantly, around the world. 

So then, who is the average user of this wondrous website? Well, demographically speaking it turns out that I am just one Facebooking year away from being in the largest female user demographic according to statistics released by Ken Burbary on his Web Business blog.  

http://www.kenburbary.com/2011/03/facebook-demographics-revisited-2011-statistics-2

What does this mean for businesses though? An opportunity to reach out to their target market or the potential to destroy brand image? Questions such as these have been explored on toprankblog.com  - 

http://www.toprankblog.com/2011/03/facebook-marketing-qa/

In my opinion the adverts that crop up on this site and other related sites do not persuade me enough to make me click on them but with that being said, I could probably reel off a few brand names that I have seen without realising on Facebook without even having to think about it. Curious!

Image credit: The Guardian