Andy looking surprisingly good in lurid green

Big congratulations to Andy who completed his second Great North Run yesterday, raising £480 for Leukemia Research UK. Shaving five minutes off his 2008 time, Andy completed the half marathon in a highly respectable 1 hour 57 minutes.  He finished in 9,819th position, leaving 44,181 other runners behind him in the dust.

We’re impressed, despite the fact that he was overtaken by someone wearing a Scooby Doo costume on the home stretch!

Thanks to everyone who sponsored Andy  and don’t be surprised if he tries to hit you up for some sponsorship for next year’s London Marathon ….

I came across a great site recently called datelance.com. In essence it’s a marketing site for a US design agency, dressed as an earnest attempt to find one of their employees – the eponymous Lance – a new girlfriend. Apparently he’s the only single person at Logoworks, and his colleagues are keen to get him hooked up. Within the FAQ section of the site you’ll find a very pertinent: “Is Lance desperate?” question, which is answered with “Lance is definitely not desperate”. Phew.

Anyway, the good news is that bda has its very own Lance. He may not have a Harvard MBA, but he does look good in a dinner suit. His name is Adam. We haven’t built him his own dating website, or created an advertising billboard, but if you are interesting in dating Adam, you can always drop us a line at ideas@thinkbda.com and we’ll make sure he gets your email.

My excuse for not getting to work on Thursday…

Whilst some might be wishing to get through this year as quickly as possible, we’re excited about the prospects for 2009 and the developments taking place in such an exciting industry (we like to think so anyway).

There can be little doubt that marketing is going to experience some substantial changes, and here are our predictions for the ones to watch out for in 2009:

- Tightening budgets mean brands will be demanding marketing that’s more measurable, and will be spending less on big TV and outdoor projects. The measurability of email and other digital campaigns, such as personalised URLs, will hasten the shift of budgets from traditional to online marketing.

- Email marketing will continue to be popular because of its familiarity, measurability and effectiveness in building customer relationships. More sophisticated data collection means email will become more targeted and can deliver personalised one-to-one marketing campaigns, rather than one size fits all mass mailings, which risk getting flagged as spam.

- The web will continue to grow as an entertainment and social medium where people spend more time watching skateboarding monkeys on YouTube and poking their friends on Facebook. In response, expect to see more marketing aimed at connecting with customers on a more personal level and to present a human face to a business’ identity.

- Print will continue to defy digital fan boys by maintaining its position as the medium in which most people prefer to receive offers. Campaigns integrating an initial print stage followed by digital activity will become more targeted, measurable and popular.

- The proliferation of the iPhone, and other true web enabled handsets, will continue pushing the growth of the mobile web at a healthy rate, and mobile marketing along with it. Advertisers will harness the popularity of social networking with the introduction of free aggregators that collect together content from different websites into one place in exchange for wedging ad messages between the Facebook updates and Twitter feeds. Brands also will rush to release iPhone apps & games, with most of them being awful.

- Yahoo’s share price will continue to plummet as it struggles to dislodge Google’s tyrannical grip of the online advertising market. Eventually it’s forced to crawl to Microsoft, with its cap in hand, and sell its search functionality at a knockdown price.

- Apple carries on calling Microsoft a nerd, infuriating Microsoft and making it try even harder to become cool, at which it continues to fail.

- Google buys Iceland (the country, not the supermarket) after the monopolies commission bans it from buying up more of the digital space.

- Disintegrating newspaper sales force the Sun and Daily Mirror to combine into a single daily. The low cost of office space in London means they’re spared from sharing the same offices, and can continue competing over who has got the best front page on their websites, which attract more views than their papers ever did.

- By June everyone owns a digibox and routinely fast forward through the ad breaks. The collapse of ad revenue means ITV and C4 can no longer afford to make their own programmes. Whilst they’ve been awarded part of the BBC’s license fee (following another campaign by ‘outraged’ Daily Mail readers), the BBC stubbornly refuses to let them onto the iPlayer. The cost of advertising becomes so low that brands start broadcasting their own TV shows. Highlights include ‘Celebrity Demolition Derby’ sponsored by Volvo and a soap opera based in a glamorous Stella Artois brewery.

- As 2009 draws to a close it’s the businesses who’ve continued marketing during the recession that’ll be best positioned to prosper as the climate improves. Along with maintaining their presence in the marketplace, they’ll also have developed their expertise in delivering targeted, cost effective marketing, whilst their rivals will struggle to regain the market share they’ve lost from remaining silent.

So those are a few of our serious predictions (and a couple less so) of what you can expect to see happening in 2009.

Perhaps the main message you’ll hear repeated everywhere is that now is not the time to panic, go into hibernation and cut back on your marketing altogether.

2009 will be the year in which marketing becomes smarter and more cost effective.

It needs to respond to the changes that were already taking place before the ‘r’ word was mentioned, and to use the tools at your disposal to deliver marketing that’s more targeted, more personalised and more effective in engaging with your customers.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

A little bit early for Christmas, but a fun game anyway.

A very simple to understand webpage to produce something to boggle minds

www.revfad.com/flip.html

Here is somewhere to go on the web to kick back and relax:- The Corona Beach

Note: make sure you enter your D of B in the American way, ie month before date, and then watch the screen as you enter the year

and if the rain won’t go away then while away the hours with CubeCraft.

All you need is a computer, a printer, and a sharp knife!

Mad inventor meets internet finds peace, presents an online op art tool for your screen or to project at dances and on bands. Give it a go and see how many patterns resemble stuff projected onto the walls in the old Top of the Pops television show! Just run Opartica and click on shapes to add them to projects and you can spin them, move them, overlap them, and set colours.

A great website that allows you to be anybody or be doing anything. Much like the seaside novelties where you put your face in a hole – but updated for the web. Very versatile and great results. You could spend hours on here.

FaceInHole.com