Pod1 Blog

Another nice campaign from our friends at Uniqlo. A great way of showcasing their new collection.

Vist the site at www.uniqlo.com/uniqlo1000/

Absolute genius!

I am going to be buying these for pressies this Xmas!

The Golden Hook website is HERE

Monday marked the launch of our Net-a-porter.com Wonderland campaign, conveying every woman’s dreamlike escapism when they shop on Net-a-porter.com.

net-a-porter.com wonderland

Pod1 conceived the multi-language campaign following a brief from Net-a-porter to help launch the SS09 season.

If you’re quick, you can see the banners in action on Elleuk.com, style.com and Vogue UK. I’ve managed to capture a snippet of one in action below:

Wonderland (the video is 5mb so you’ll need to be a little patient)

From the shoot:

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This was my second SES London and I remember last year coming out feeling inspired and somewhat motivated, perhaps I’m becoming a little harder to impress, but this year didn’t quite do it for me.

Now I don’t want to sound to cynical but I felt that although the conference had grown from 2 to 3 days the content hadn’t quite increased inline. Whereas last year I felt spoiled for choice, this year there were time slots I struggled a little to fill. But as I said above I don’t want to be negative and all the sessions I did attend were very useful covering a wide range of topics.

I started with Brand & Reputation Management which looked at issues such as trademarks in paid search and the legal implication of bloggers posting false or unsubstantiated claim about your brand online. This is one area which will continue to grow in importance as Brands become more aware of their online reputation.

I followed this with a very good session on Social Media Marketing, an area I believe still has tons of potential, if approached in the right way! Next up I sat in on the Duplicate Content Issues session and have already implemented a couple of top tips on client sites. It goes without saying that e-commerce sites suffers particularly badly from duplicate content due to the number of different ways product content can be displayed or grouped. A simple process of telling the search engines which version of a page to index can quickly fix this. I then sat in on the Linkbait session which had a few familiar faces from last year but with some new ideas.

The biggest surprise of the day for me was that barely a session went by without some mention of Twitter it appears that the online marketing industry as a whole believe this little baby still has legs and I’m inclined to agree, (as long as I don’t have to figure out how to monetize it!) now Twitter is heading over to the mainstream it’s reach is about to become truly vast!

So all in all definitely a worthwhile day out, will I be going again next year? You bet, we still lag well behind our American cousins in many areas of search and where we don’t well it’s nice to know you’re heading in the right direction.

Conran Group, whose interests encompass design, shop, restaurant and brand licensing has selected Pod1 to re-design it’s web presence.

The new website will replace the current site, which has only limited details on each Conran company and directs users to several different shopping, restaurant and design websites.

The Conran Group was founded in 1990 by Sir Terence Conran. It is currently developing a hotel, bakery and restaurant project called Boundary, in Shoreditch, London.

Pod1 co-founder Fadi Shuman says, "We’re super excited to be working with such a design legend and are looking forward to  mutually prosperous, long term relationship."

Play your cards right and visit www.myla-valentines.com
Watch the Myla Valentines clips on youtube

A great example of a brand using interactive content from Snack Strong Productions. Open from 6pm to 6am but its worth making a reservation.

Take a look at http://hotel626.com/

Retail week published an article quoting the 2004 US census where our American Friends found out that 80% of all household budgets are controlled by women.
The Article as well introduces the concept of Buying Psychology and physical differences in how a female brain works. For the web optimisation team at Pod1 this is old news but if your website launch plan doesn’t cater for this, read on…

I think we can safely assume now that budget control is fully in female hands in even more households now that everyone is trying to save every penny. If you need more convincing, just remember the days when you were a kid and wanted that new Atari video games console and your dad would say: “I’ll have to discuss this with your Mom.” You knew that you wouldn’t get it.

If you are in online retail (and that includes insurances and holidays) you should not only know what your customer wants but you should be quick on the heels when it comes to marketing to the right person. Car dealers have practiced that for a long time now after they found out that Children actually make the decision which car to buy.

In the online retail world that means that not only do you have to market to what you (probably think but is actually far off reality if you haven’t done an online survey) think is your target audience but you have to market to the budget holder as well (Think your Finance director trying to save 1p on pencils)

This is especially important in the sector Pod1 is well known for, the fashion ecommerce industry. Marketing to Women is not at all about making websites pink and sparkly it’s about appealing to different needs of your TWO target audiences.

You have to on the one hand be hip enough to get your target audience to want your items but you have to be sober enough to convince the budget holder that the items desired by a 14 year old with a questionable sense for skirt length are a good buy. Where one might be wowed by an all singing and dancing flash piece, the budget holder might be more wowed by Wash/Care instructions and product copy that tells them about the durability of the item.

A not to be ignored factor when marketing to women is word of mouth. What could be better than having customer reviews on your site. You might think that having customer reviews about a pair of socks on your site isn’t going to help you sell more of these, but maybe stories about your accessories and how great they are does. Our friends at Bazaarvoice have a great product called, surprise surprise, Stories.

Many retailers are scared about letting users comment on their site but even the bad reviews are good reviews. As we saw with the Belkin-Gate having only positive reviews make users suspicious and most dismiss negative reviews as works of a lonely soul with too much time on their hands.

There are many more factors to be taken into account when marketing to women. Take action now and contact the Pod1 Web optimization team if you want to convert Prospects into Customers.

Sexy lingerie brand MYLA, has launched it’s valentine campaign comprising of the usual sultry and seductive models…

The Pod1 conceived and created campaign promotes the latest range of MYLA underwear in a fun and sexy way.

Visit http://www.myla-valentines.com