Louise Brice

Louise Brice is a Research Director at Ipsos MORI. All views are her own.

Brand Believers

By May 24 2013, 1:51 pm Leave a comment

Everyone has one.  A drawer of tech – old mobiles, chargers, battery chargers, old cameras, that newer tech has made redundant.

I cannot quite bear to turn mine out, they remind me of good times.

And my drawer is full of Nokia phones, as from the first phone I bought, up until my iPhone, Nokia was the only brand of phone I chose to buy.

I was reminded of my love for Nokia during a talk by a visiting speaker, Mark Selby, a Nokia alumni.  One of the best things about working at Ipsos MORI is the round of visiting speakers that come in and talk to us, a programme instigated a few years ago by Ben Page, our CEO and fortunately for us, one of the best connected people in our industry.  Mark spoke very engagingly about his experiences and how to build brands, loyalty and longevity.

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Celebrity. Human after all.

By January 17 2013, 1:12 pm Comments Off

Modalu Pippa Grab BagChances are that willingly or not, few of us will have managed to avoid “day 101” in the big brother celeb fest of “I’m a jungle-celebrity-strictly-dancing on ice” before and after Christmas.

But oh how we love it.  Just look at how popular the Daily Mail online is – the world’s most visited newspaper website, which features a heavy quota of celeb-related articles. Read more »

Love it or Hate it…

By November 14 2012, 11:08 am Comments Off
Robbie Williams switches on the Marmite Oxford Street Lights

Copyright: PA Images Yui Mok/PA Wire

Marmite and Robbie Williams have quite a bit in common.  Marmite has traded on being “loved” or “hated” since (and the various ad agencies that have bought this to life over recent years have created many of my favourite ads of all times.

Now Robbie Williams hasn’t traded his image in quite the same way, but for many he is just as polarising. For every woman in her 30’s swooning / going into labour early at the thought of another comeback tour, there are others (Radio 1 now included apparently), who would rather he got on a plane back to LA and started looking at the sky again.

However, both of these mega brands were bought together last week to switch on the lights at Oxford Street, which this year Marmite has sponsored.

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oh what a night

By November 7 2012, 11:49 am Comments Off

On this side of the “pond” many of us (who didn’t have the stamina, or the access to hard alcohol that some of my colleagues did – you know who you are),  are waking up to the news that Barack Obama has been re-elected for “Four more years”.  And the President’s simple tweet of this message with a heart warming photo of him hugging Michelle has in the space of a few hours become the most re-tweeted Tweet – standing at over 500,000 tweets and rising.

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Britain’s Creatives We Heart You

By October 10 2012, 9:19 pm Comments Off

So if a client briefed you on a new campaign that needed to demonstrate how much they love coffee, love their customers, and brings their commitment to both coffee and customer care to life, how many of us would have thought “yeah, I know – nodding heads, buried in coffee beans, singing  a cover of a Kiss song”?

But those wonderful people at Karmarama think exactly like that.  T-G-F-T.  Because then we get ads like the “I was made for loving you” new Costa Creative.  I love it – great music, great engagement, great “stickiness”, and it makes me want to drink coffee (and I am a 12-cups-of-builder’s-tea -a-day-kind-of-girl). Read more »

“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”

By September 21 2012, 11:19 am Comments Off

Running PictureHow did that happen?  It’s Autumn again.  And, to quote Keats, there is a mellow fruitfulness in the air – the post-Olympics glow is still with us.

And mellow is a sentiment that probably describes the nation well at the moment – as we have sat on our sofas and, in record numbers, tuned in to the fantastic Olympic and Paralympic coverage.

And as we tuned in from couches and pubs across the land, the distance between track and couch has been getting shorter. Read more »

Get over your hangover, there’s another party coming to town

By August 22 2012, 10:18 pm Comments Off

They are the Games that just keep on giving.

As we work our way through the post Olympics gloom, advertisers are doing their best to help us get over our collective national hangover, by reminding us of our favourite moments and our heroes of the Games.

BT aired a perfectly timed post-Olympics ad last Monday, featuring lots of Games footage, and capitalising on our Olympics euphoria at just the right moment, before any other ads had a chance.  This was potentially a gamble, but one that paid off, and avoided having to compete for attention during the Games themselves. Read more »

Olympics 2012: Engaging New Media

By August 9 2012, 2:20 pm Comments Off

How is it for you?  Here are some quick stats..

Peak BBC audience figures of 26.9 million for the Opening Ceremony.

Twitter reported a worldwide total of 9.66 million mentions of the Opening Ceremony.

The 100m final saw over 100,000 tweets per minute.

An Opening Ceremony shown in 3D.

Over 1.5 million downloads of the BBC Olympics app.

And the most watched clip on BBC Sport website  in week 1 was Bradley Wiggins’s time trial with 729,000 views. Read more »

“So tell me what you Want, what you really, really Want”

By July 26 2012, 3:15 pm Comments Off

If recent reports are to be believed Facebook are rumoured to be launching a new “Want” button.  (And I wonder why they didn’t time the launch to coincide with the recent Spice Girls re-union :) )

It’s an interesting move if true.  In recent years, conversation about social media (and mainly Facebook), has shifted from “Should we do it?” to “What is the value of doing it?”  And more specifically “What impact is this activity having on sales and profitability?”

So maybe to help answer these questions, or indeed to give us another set of questions to ponder, Facebook is rumoured to be granting us another button. Read more »

Painting the town red, white – and green?

By July 11 2012, 3:29 pm Comments Off

With the volume of marketing activity being focused on London this summer, it is not surprising that Heineken is using outdoor experiential marketing to cut through and reinforce brand linkage. They are painting 150 London pubs green and also kitting out staff and interiors with Heineken branded uniforms, glassware and other POS materials.

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