News and insights

In June 2015, after the Smiler crash at Alton Towers left five people seriously injured, Merlin's chief executive Nick Varney went on television and did something corporate lawyers tend to discourage. He […]

Another November, another inbox full of “BIGGEST SALE EVER” subject lines. When every brand is offering 20%, 30% or 50% off, does the discount actually make anyone stop scrolling? People […]

The October edit Trumpets in the bathroom. Dinner five metres below the North Sea. A ring that needs its own watering schedule. Welcome to our favourite corner of the internet, where […]

October has arrived, and social media can't quite decide which season it's in. Feeds are full of pumpkins, costume reveals and spooky-season content, while behind the scenes most brands have already […]

Reach tells you how many people saw something. It doesn't tell you whether anything changed as a result. That gap, between visibility and impact, is where most KOL measurement currently lives, […]

New year, new me. Except apparently, we’re not waiting for the new year anymore. The September reset has taken over TikTok, with creators swapping the post-summer slump for freshly organised […]

On the biggest morning of his career, announcing Sainsbury's proposed merger with Asda, chief executive Mike Coupe sat waiting between broadcast interviews and quietly sang "We're in the Money" to himself. […]

For fifteen years earned media has been the awkward middle child of the marketing budget; loved in principle yet squeezed in practice. PR has at times been seen as the problem child of marketing in […]

Follower count is easy to read on a dashboard. It’s also, increasingly, one of the weaker signals of creator value. A follower is someone who pressed a button once. An audience watches. A community […]

A creator makes content. An influencer moves behaviour. On paper, that’s a small distinction. In practice, it’s one of the most expensive mistakes we see brands make when planning a campaign […]

Deal announcements have a rhythm everyone in corporate communications knows. Weeks of secrecy, a dawn RNS, a choreographed morning of calls, a press release with the word "transformational" doing heavy […]

Most creator briefs fail for the same reason: they’re written to protect the brand, not to produce good content. That instinct is understandable. A brief often feels like the last moment a […]

Social media was built on a simple idea: keeping up with people you know. You logged on to see a friend’s holiday photos, catch up on family news or find out what people in your wider circle […]

The Institute for Crisis Management has been categorising corporate crises since 1990, and year after year its data shows the same thing: most of them smoulder. In its latest annual report, roughly […]

The brands winning on social today aren't simply creating better content, they're making better decisions. They know how to read a cultural moment before deciding whether to join it, what to say and […]

Do CEOs affect company value? Strategy academics have spent four decades measuring exactly that, and the answer is yes, substantially. Studies that decompose company performance attribute somewhere […]

September has arrived, and with it comes a very specific energy on social media. Kids are back at school, the last of the summer holiday photos are still trickling into feeds, and every platform in […]

Ask most marketers whether B2B marketing and corporate marketing are the same thing, and you'll get a confident answer. The trouble is, half will say yes. They're not the same, but the confusion […]

Something interesting is happening in sport. Padel courts are booking out months in advance. Pickleball has gone from niche American import to weekend fixture. Run clubs fill city parks every evening, […]

In 2009, Simon Sinek stood up at a TEDx event in Puget Sound and drew three circles on a flip chart. The talk that followed has been watched more than 70 million times, and its central claim has survived […]

Most brands still report on social performance as if follower count were the scoreboard. It isn't. The audience that drives brand growth is an audience that has never followed the account at all. That's […]