MarCom Professional

Piracy. Regardless of your view its clear something has got to give.

Countless websites such as alluc.org and surfthechannel.com offer viewers the very latest programming, hosted illegally on third party sites, at no charge. 

Sure, iTunes has had some success at promoting the paid-for model but the vast majority of licensed content is still being streamed/downloaded illegally in torrent form.

So ubiquitous is this practice that numerous content providers, including Comedy Central (www.southparkstudios.com), the BBC (www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer) and Fox (www.fox.com/FOD) have resorted to giving away content free of charge, presumedly to claw back control from the ether. More...

Rebranding is one of the toughest exercises a company can go through. The irony is that most people will only go through it once, maybe twice in their career. This means a lot of learning gets lost in the ether of promotions and job moves. Luckily there are a handful of agencies out there who coordinate rebranding programmes day-in, day-out. Here are Endpoint's pointers on what to look out for. 

1. Project planning is crucial. Given the scale of works it is necessary to prioritise where and how efforts should be concentrated in order ensure individual business units know exactly how to approach rebranding. Realistic targets, backed by practical and technical knowledge, need to be set in order to push the rebrand through. More...

"The sign brings customers"

The Fortune-Tellers. Fable 15.

Jean de la Fontaine, 17th century French poet (with no doubt family in the sign business)

Before I joined the brand implementation racket I knew nothing about signage. I still know very little about the technical specification of signs, but I have been blown away by their importance to both the decision making cycle and branding in general. These 5 points will hopefully shed some light on the role signage plays for those more at home with Adwords than AutoCAD.

 1. Signage is more important that you could possible imagine. More...

Imagine that you head up a large marketing department. You've got a digital specialist. A PR specialist. A DM whizz. B2B, P2P, SEO and every other acronym covered. They all love you. You are a marketing genius and embrace new trends and technologies while paying homage to the classics. You are untouchable.

Then one day, while out visiting the back offices of your corporate hinterland, you catch sight of your old corporate identity plastered all over pens, stationery and signage. You call your corporate identity specialist into the office and ask how this has happened, but she is as perplexed as you are. More...