UCAS Clearing 2009 explained by the University of Bedfordshire

As Clearing is starting up tomorrow I thought i'd add a video to the blog to show how a single source of information can be shared amongst various sites. This is running in YouTube, on our staff website and our main website and now on this Blogger page.

The wonders of having the ability to embed content from different sources! This post was actually written within YouTube and posted directly from there... yet more functionality from Google!

I have seen the future... and it's name is Media Neutral Planning!

Reading through the latest copy of Marketing Week this morning I spotted an interesting, albeit small, article on Sony Europe reviewing it's advertising plan for this year. With an estimated £50 million to spend they have decided to move away from TV advertising, which has served them well with the memorable BRAVIA adverts, towards a more media-neutral brand strategy.

Although this is far from a new idea, I think this is probably a move many large companies are looking to adopt. I have been looking at ideas around Media Neutral Planning (MNP) for the last 6 months. To help explain what MNP is Dave Chaffey has a sum-up on his blog:

"An approach to planning ad campaigns to maximize response across different media according to consumer usage of these media."

Essential, MNP is the idea of taking the bias away from your planning strategy and instead ensuring that the most used areas are maximised in the planning stage. No more "I like TV adverts so we'll spend our money there!"

With a small budget and a niche market such as ours in the HE sector it's even more important to ensure that every penny counts and MNP can certainly help with this. As mentioned in the article the internet and explosion in social media is driving the consumers behaviour and anyone working in marketing needs to ensure they're as flexible and open minded as possible!

All online advertising can be a click away from going viral or failing miserably and it's usually the things you least expect that reap the highest rewards. Keeping an open mind at the planning stage and not favouring any particular strand can mean you have the best possible chance of achieving a high return for your investment.