We received a ‘highly recommended’ Silver Award once again. We felt we were in with a really strong chance of Gold but no matter, it was still an awesome night and we’re over the moon at the success of this year.

We have delivered over 235 projects this year alone, working with some of the coolest brands on the planet at gigs, festivals and events all over the UK and Europe. We have a lot of work in the pipeline for 2010 already, some of which we will start planning and booking very soon. We’ve also got an awesome new development on the database front and hugely improved interactivity in the new phase of the website.

Lots to come, and lots to celebrate.

Not least our Mashers themselves. Without them nothing would be possible and as if to prove this very point – a team of our girls and guys did us immensely proud at the awards last night effortlessly hosting the guests and presenting the awards – with class and professionalism that only Mash can offer!

Here’s to a fantastic year ahead.

The survey, which was conducted by Harris Interactive, found that when it comes to getting information to help them with purchase decisions, American adults of all ages use a mixture of traditional media and new media, including those that would constitute “push” (advertising and websites) and “pull” (information from neutral, informal communication).

Most Popular Info-Gathering Methods

The most frequently identified methods of gathering information to make purchase decisions are using a company website (36%), face-to-face communication with a salesperson or other company representative (22%), and face-to-face communication with a person not associated with the company (21%).

Only 4% of respondents reporte using social networking sites to gather purchase-decision information, the study found.

Differences in Sources Among Age Groups

Though pop culture often portrays younger adults as “text-crazed” and less interested in face-to-face discourse than older adults, according to Harris, the survey found that one-third of 18-24 year-olds (33%) say they obtain information through in-person communication with family members or friends, compared with 21% of all adults who say the same thing.

Harris did find, however, that 18-24-year-olds are more likely to use public online social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace (16%). These youngest adults are also significantly less likely than older adults to use online chat or email directly with companies (2%).

Memorable Brand Experiences Generate More Positive Action

The poll then asked adults who had a memorable product purchase, product use, or service experience if they had taken any type of downstream action as a result – and nearly four in five said they had (79%). Notably, 72% say they took positive action, with 57% communicating about their positive experience with others and 41% specifically recommending that someone make a purchase.

Respondents with negative memorable experiences appear to go in greater numbers to the vendor or supplier. Some 41% of purchasers who took action say they communicated directly to the vendor or supplier. Of this group, 68% were looking for some type of issue resolution and more than half (53%) say they had their issue resolved in a positive manner while 13%, still had unresolved issues.

Demographically, Baby Boomers and Matures are more likely to communicate directly with vendors (48% and 57%) while Echo Boomers and Gen Xers are less likely to do so (28% and 35%).

Industry Differerences in Communication/Recommendation

Harris Interactive also discovered definite differences in downstream communications and product recommendation, depending on the industry from which respondents purchase:

Those who purchase in the automotive space are more likely to communicate with the vendor (43%) and have positive communication (46%).
Those who purchase in the healthcare space and entertainment space are more likely to have positive communications afterward (45% and 43% respectively).
Those who purchase technology products (44%) and entertainment products (42%) are more more likely to make a product recommendation.
Interestingly, Harris said that in most industries – but especially automotive and healthcare services – there is greater downstream likelihood that consumers are conveying positive messages than positively recommending.

Communications Used After Purchase

Of those who had communicated to others after their purchase, almost three in five (59%) communicated with someone not directly associated with the company, such as a customer service or tech support representative.

Methods reportedly used for communication:

Meanwhile, less than one in 10 used a public online social networking site, such as Facebook, for this communication (9%), an online message board, discussion forum, chat room, blog or wiki (8%), an independent website that has reviews (7%) or a private online social networking site (5%), Harris said.

Downstream Behavior and Further Purchase Likelihood

Overall, two in five (40%) of those with a memorable purchase experience say they would definitely be more likely to purchase again based on their own experiences. Of those who communicated about their positive product or service experience to others, more than three-fourths (76%) say they were more likely to repurchase, with only 5% saying they would be less likely to purchase. Among those who had made a positive recommendation, 79% would be more likely to repurchase in the future, compared with only 6% who would be less likely, the survey found.

Looking at those who had more negative experiences, 46% of those who communicated about their negative experience would be less likely to purchase, while about one-fourth (24%) would still be likely to repurchase, Harris said.

Among those who had recommended against purchasing a product, 63% would be less likely to repurchase compared with 24% who would be more likely to repurchase.

Harris concluded that this research provides three key takeaways:

Methods of obtaining information and post-experience communication is much more likely to occur through a mix of traditional and new-age consumer generated (social) media, both offline and online. Further, few are using social networking tools.
Communication to others about a product or service experience is more likely to occur than recommendation, and there is much variability by product/service category. Also, most post-experience communication takes place offline.
Data suggest that the action of offline and online methods of communicating directly to others about experiences – except for message boards, blogs, and wikis – equally impacts, or at least generally correlates with, customers’ own future purchase behavior. These findings also suggest that the act of communicating to others, positively or negatively, has the same impact on customers’ own behavior as the act of actually recommending.
Despite recent hype about the significant influence of social media, these Harris Poll findings appear to echo several recent studies that indicate that social networks are only beginning to have significant impact on purchases. Earlier this year, Mintel also reported that real-life WOM beats online by a wide margin, while a study by WorkPlace Media found that brands’ official presences on social networks make up only a fraction of a consumers overall view of those brands.

About the poll: This Harris Poll was conducted online within the US from March 9-16, 2009, among 2,355 adults (ages 18 and over) who agreed to participate in Harris Interactive surveys. Figures for age, sex, race/ethnicity, education, region and household income were weighted where necessary to bring them into line with their actual proportions in the population

We are continuously hunting for ways to improve and refine the staffing process and believe that this initiative will effectively aid us in this endeavour.

Understanding the Challenge 1 > Our first person to jump at the challenge was our very own Talent Manager, Gregorious the Gentle.

We conducted a quick interview with him post activity;

What was it like being down in the trenches?

I really enjoyed it. I think I got lucky in a way with the job I was given. Being in a positive environment like John Lewis in Kingston certainly beats leafletting in the rain on a dodgy street corner!

What was the biggest surprise for you?

Many ‘Mashers’ feed back to me that working alone is the kind of job they would rather avoid and I can completely understand after this experience. I’m the kind of person who thrives on being around people; be it colleagues, peers etc so working alone was a whole new concept for me. I suppose the biggest surprise to me was how easy it was to speak to people and how many responses I got and yet how few sales I was able to conclude on! (am not bitter…honest!!)

What was the hardest part of the job?

This was a Sales Job – no question. I couldn’t have had more conversations with consumers or demonstrated the coffee machine more in the time but it was such a complex challenge convincing the shoppers to buy a machine there and then.

What insight have you gained as a result of this?

I suppose I’ve realised the importance of practicing what we preach. The need to be on-brand in terms of appearance, punctuality, product knowledge, demeanour and attitude really couldn’t be more apparent in an environment like John Lewis where ALL the employees are employed on their ability to retain absolute standards on all these alements too.

Would you do it again!?

Absolutely. I honestly got a real buzz from it and was intrigued to see and sense the various consumer responses to what was an amazing brand and coffee machine. Consumer behaviour and psychologies have always interested me and this provided great insight into the various behaviours. Who knows, next time I might actually sell a few more…

We are passionate advocates of great promotional staffing, disciples of excellence and real supporters of change through innovation in our sector. We are immensely proud to have been recognised with this award and want to thank all of our fantastic clients, partners who have had the foresite to allocate their staffing fulfilment to us as their specialists and work with us as partners rather than clients, thereby providing the dynamic that has enabled us to innovate and perpetually improve our product and service offering. We would also like to send a huge thanks to our wonderful book of brand ambassadors, our Mashers. Through their dedication and commitment to our business, they have enabled us to over deliver on our campaigns, raising the bar in staffing fulfilment and adding substance and credibility to our ‘excellence in staffing’ mantra.

Thank you one and all!

http://isp.org.uk/awards.php?pid=28

By BRAD STONE of The New York Times

When Facebook signed up its 100 millionth member last August, its employees spread out in two parks in Palo Alto, Calif., for a huge barbecue. Sometime this week, this five-year-old start-up, born in a dorm room at Harvard, expects to register its 200 millionth user.

That staggering growth rate – doubling in size in just eight months – suggests Facebook is rapidly becoming the Web’s dominant social ecosystem and an essential personal and business networking tool in much of the wired world.

Yet Facebook executives say they aren’t planning to observe their latest milestone in any significant way. It is, perhaps, a poor time to celebrate. The company that has given users new ways to connect and speak truth to power now often finds itself as the target of that formidable grass-roots firepower – most recently over controversial changes it made to users’ home pages.

As Facebook expands, it’s also struggling to match the momentum of hot new start-ups like Twitter, the micro-blogging service, while managing the expectations of young, tech-savvy early adopters, attracting mainstream moms and dads, and justifying its hype-carbonated valuation.

By any measure, Facebook’s growth is a great accomplishment. The crew of Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s 24-year-old co-founder and chief executive, is signing up nearly a million new members a day, and now more than 70 percent of the service’s members live overseas, in countries like Italy, the Czech Republic and Indonesia. Facebook’s ranks in those countries swelled last year after the company offered its site in their languages.

All of this mojo puts Facebook on a par with other groundbreaking – and wildly popular – Internet services like free e-mail, Google, the online calling network Skype and e-commerce sites like eBay. But Facebook promises to change how we communicate even more fundamentally, in part by digitally mapping and linking peripatetic people across space and time, allowing them to publicly share myriad and often very personal elements of their lives.

Unlike search engines, which ably track prominent Internet presences, Facebook reconnects regular folks with old friends and strengthens their bonds with new pals – even if the glue is nothing more than embarrassing old pictures or memories of their second-grade teacher.

Facebook can also help rebuild families. Karen Haber, a mother of two living outside Tel Aviv, logs onto Facebook each night after she puts the children to bed. She searches for her family’s various surnames, looking for relatives from the once-vast Bachenheimer clan of northern Germany, which fractured during the Holocaust and then dispersed around the globe.

Among the three dozen or so connections she has made on Facebook over the last year are a fifth cousin who is a clinical social worker in Woodstock, N.Y.; a fourth cousin running an eyeglasses store in Zurich; and another fifth cousin, living in Hong Kong selling diamonds. Now she shares memories, photographs and updates with them.

“I was never into genealogy and now suddenly I have this tool that helps me find the descendants of people that my grandparents knew, people who share the same truth I do,” Ms. Haber says. “I’m using Facebook and trying to unite this family.”

Facebook has also become a vehicle for broad-based activism – like the people who organized on the site last year and mobilized 12 million people to march in protests around the globe against practices of the FARC rebels in Colombia.

Discussing Facebook’s connective tissue, Mr. Zuckerberg recalls the story of Claus Drachmann, a schoolteacher in northern Denmark who became a Facebook friend of Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Denmark’s prime minister. Mr. Drachmann subsequently invited Mr. Rasmussen to speak to his class of special-needs children; the prime minister obliged last fall.

Mr. Zuckerberg says the story illustrates Facebook’s power to cut through arbitrary social barriers. “This represents a generational shift in technology,” he says. “To me, what is interesting was that it was possible for a regular person to reach the prime minister and that that interaction happened.”

As Facebook has matured, so has Mr. Zuckerberg. He has recently traded his disheveled, unassuming image for an ever-present tie and making visits to media outfits like “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” And he says Facebook’s most important metrics are not its membership but the percentage of the wired world that uses the site and the amount of information – photographs, news articles and status updates – zipping across its servers.

Facebook’s mission, he says, is to be used by everyone in the world to share information seamlessly. “Two hundred million in a world of six billion is tiny,” he says. “It’s a cool milestone. It’s great that we reached that, especially in such a short amount of time. But there is so much more to do.”

AS Facebook stampedes along, it still has to get out of its own way to soothe the injured feelings of users like Liz Rabban.

Ms. Rabban, 40, a real estate agent and the mother of two from Livingston, N.J., joined the site in November 2007, quickly amassing 250 friends and spending hours on the site each day.

But these days, she spends less time on the site and posts caustic comments about Facebook’s new design, which turns a majority of every user’s home page into a long “stream” of recent, often trivial, Twitter-like updates from friends.

“The changes just feel very juvenile,” Ms. Rabban says. “It’s just not addressing the needs of my generation and my peers. In my circle, everyone is pretty devastated about it.”

Ms. Rabban is not alone. More than two and a half million dissenters have joined a group on Facebook’s own site called “Millions Against Facebook’s New Layout and Terms of Service.” Others are lambasting the changes in their own status updates, which are now, ironically, distributed much more visibly to all of their Facebook friends.

The changes, Facebook executives say, are intended to make the act of sharing – not just information about themselves but what people are doing now – easier, faster and more urgent. Chris Cox, 26, Facebook’s director of products and a confidant of Mr. Zuckerberg, envisions users announcing where they are going to lunch as they leave their computers so friends can see the updates and join them.

“That is the kind of thing that is not meaningful when it is announced 40 minutes later,” he says.

The simmering conflict over the design change speaks to the challenges of pleasing 200 million users, many of whom feel pride of ownership because they helped to build the site with free labor and very personal contributions.

“They have a strange problem,” says S. Shyam Sundar, co-director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory at Pennsylvania State University, of Facebook’s quandary. “This is a technology that has inherently generated community, and it has gotten to the point where members of that community feel not only vested but empowered to challenge the company.”

Those tensions boiled up previously, when Facebook announced the intrusive Beacon advertising system in 2007, and again when Facebook introduced new service terms earlier this year, which appeared to give the company broad commercial control over the content people uploaded to the site.

Facebook responded to protests over the second move by promising users a vote in how the site would be governed.

But while Facebook is willing to give users a voice, it doesn’t necessarily want to listen.

Users are widely opposed to terms that grant Facebook the right to license, copy and disseminate members’ content worldwide. But Facebook says it has to ignore those objections to protect itself against lawsuits from users who might blame the company if they later regret having shared some piece of information with their friends. (Other Web sites have similar stipulations.)

While Facebook addressed the feedback on its unpopular design changes last week – partly by saying it would give users more control over the stream of updates that appear on their pages – it also said members’ pages would soon become even busier and more dynamic, updating automatically instead of requiring users to refresh their browsers to see new posts.

That’s a change that may irk users like Ms. Rabban, who don’t like how busy their pages have become. Facebook executives counter that it will help users share more information, and that they will eventually come to appreciate it, just as they have with previous changes that were initially jarring.

“It’s not a democracy,” Mr. Cox says of his company’s relationship with users. “We are here to build an Internet medium for communicating and we think we have enough perspective to do that and be caretakers of that vision.”

PEOPLE, of course, sometimes like to keep secrets and maintain separate social realms – or at least a modicum of their privacy. But Facebook at almost 200 million members is a force that reinvents and tears at such boundaries. Teachers are yoked together with students, parents with their children, employers with their employees.

Uniting disparate groups on a single Internet service runs counter to 50 years of research by sociologists into what is known as “homophily” – the tendency of individuals to associate only with like-minded people of similar age and ethnicity.

Facebook’s huge growth is creating inevitable collisions as the whole notion of “friend” takes on a highly elastic meaning. When the Philadelphia Eagles allowed the star safety Brian Dawkins to leave for the Denver Broncos earlier this month, Dan Leone, a gate chief at Lincoln Financial Field, the Eagles’ stadium, expressed his disappointment by referring to the situation with an obscenity on his Facebook status update.

Mr. Leone’s boss, who was his Facebook friend, forwarded the update to an Eagles guest services manager, who fired him. The team has since refused to reconsider the matter, despite Mr. Leone’s deep remorse and his star turn on countless radio talk shows across the country to discuss the situation.

“If you know your boss is online, or anyone close to your boss is online, don’t be making comments that can be detrimental to your employment,” Mr. Leone advises.

Facebook is trying to teach members to use privacy settings to manage their network so they can speak discreetly only to certain friends, like co-workers or family members, as opposed to other “friends” like bosses or professional colleagues. But most Facebook users haven’t taken advantage of the privacy settings; the company estimates that only 20 percent of its members use them.

Other problems are trickier, especially among true friends and family members. How, for example, can Facebook remain a place for teenagers to share what they did on Saturday night when it is also the place where their parents are swapping investment tips with old friends?

In the six weeks since Rich Hall, a 52-year-old theater manager in Mount Carroll, Ill., joined Facebook, he has reconnected with more than 400 friends and acquaintances, including former high school friends, his auto mechanic and former buddies from his days as a stock car driver.

In the course of his new half-hour-a-day Facebook habit, Mr. Hall also “friended” the 60 high school students he is directing in a school play, so he could coordinate rehearsal times. That led some of them to deny his request because, as he says they told him, their parents “found it creepy.” Along the way, Mr. Hall also found photographs of his 19-year-old son on the site, drinking beer at a Friday night bonfire.

“He denied it and said he wasn’t there,” Mr. Hall says. “I said, ‘Let’s go to this page together and look at these photos.’ Of course he did it. There are no secrets anymore.”

Dwindling secrets, and prying eyes, are at the heart of the Facebook conundrum. While offering an efficient and far-reaching way for people to bond, the site has also eroded sometimes natural barriers.

“People usually spend a lot of time trying to be separate – parents and children are a good example,” says Danah Boyd, a social scientist who has studied social networks and now works in the research department of Microsoft, which has invested in Facebook. “You are already seeing young people sitting there thinking, ‘Why am I hanging out with my mother who is reminiscing with her high school mates?’ You are seeing some reticence with young people that wasn’t there two years ago.”

For their part, Facebook executives say they are less interested in being cool than in being a useful place where anyone can go to share elements of their lives.

“The people who started the company weren’t cool. I’m not cool,” Mr. Cox says. “If you look at the people who work here, it’s much more nerdy and curious than cool.

“Cool only lasts for so long, but being useful is something that applies to everyone.”

MR. ZUCKERBERG hopes that being ubiquitous and useful translates to the bottom line.

Though Facebook is privately held and doesn’t publicly disclose its earnings, various press and analysts’ estimates of its 2008 revenues span from $250 million to $400 million. That range may not be enough to cover the company’s escalating expenses, and it hardly justifies some of the atmospheric valuations that have been placed on the start-up, including the $15 billion that Microsoft assigned to the company when it invested in it in 2007.

Facebook’s financial challenges aren’t unique. Popular free e-mail services like Hotmail from Microsoft and Gmail from Google have little in the way of profits to show for their vast audiences, aside from a few text ads that people rarely click on. Instant messaging networks like Microsoft Messenger and AIM from American Online are similarly popular but have never been hyperprofitable, for the simple reason that people do not want intrusive ads inserted into personal conversations.

Facebook’s approach is to invite advertisers to join in the conversation. New “engagement” ads ask users to become fans of products and companies – sometimes with the promise of discounts. If a person gives in, that commercial allegiance is then broadcast to all of the person’s friends on the site.

A new kind of engagement ad, now being tested, will invite people to vote – “what’s your favorite color M&M?” for example – and brands will pay every time a Facebook member participates.

“We are trying to provide the antidote for the consumer rebellion against interruptive advertising,” says Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer and Mr. Zuckerberg’s business consigliere.

Ms. Sandberg, who ran Google’s highly successful advertising initiatives before leaving the search giant to join Facebook, said her company’s revenue was growing despite a brutal downturn that is hurting other kinds of online advertising. She also puts one rumor to rest, saying the company is not considering charging members for any aspect of its service.

“We’re pretty pleased with the overall trajectory,” she says. “Our conversations with big advertisers have broadened in scope and we also have more people asking about how they can work with us.”

Facebook recently introduced advertising tools to let companies focus on users based on the language they use on the site and their geographic location. So, for example, an advertiser can now tailor a message to the Latino community in Los Angeles or French speakers in Montreal.

Despite the gloom permeating much of the advertising world, and the formidable challenges facing the site, some advertisers say they glimpse the future in Facebook’s brand of interactive advertising.

“Our clients all want to see if they can make this work,” says Al Cadena, the interactive account director at Threshold Interactive in Los Angeles, which represents companies like Nestlé, Honda and Sony. “Advertising used to be a one-way communication from advertiser to consumer, but now people want to have a dialogue. And Facebook is becoming the default way to do that, not only in the States but really for the whole world.”

Internet evangelists say that when a technology diffuses into society, as Facebook appears to be doing, it has achieved “critical mass.” The sheer presence of all their friends, family and colleagues on Facebook creates potent ties between users and the site – ties that are hard to break even when people want to break them.

Many who have tried to free themselves of their daily Facebook habit and leave the site, like Kerry Docherty, a student at Pepperdine University’s law school, speak of a powerful gravitational pull and an undercurrent of peer pressure that eventually brings them back.

“People gave me a hard time for leaving Facebook,” says Ms. Docherty, who quit at the end of 2007 but then rejoined six months later. “Everyone has a love-hate relationship with it. They wanted me to be wasting my time on it just like they were wasting their time on it.”

Maddie and Holly and the famous Sock Monkeys

My name is Maddie George.  I am 23.  I live in North London.  I like to spend my Saturdays exploring, laughing, and eating cake.  I like the colour purple, I like The Beatles.  I like cookery shows,  and harbour an unhealthy obsession with 24 / Jack Bauer.  I clean too much, I recycle and boss my boyfriend around more than he would like.  My spelling is rubbish.  I am normal.

On 22nd January 2009, less than 24 hours after finding a lump in my neck, I was diagnosed with Stage 2a Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, a type of Cancer that affects the Lymph nodes (the glands in your neck, groin and armpits).

In a split second, my life was turned upside down, destined never to be the same again.  I am a positive person but the thought of having and battling cancer was a massive shock to the system and more than I thought I could handle.
What does this mean? How will this affect me? Will I see my next birthday? How bad is it? Why do I not look sick? These questions muddled through my head one after the other.  While Cancer is very rare, I couldn’t help but ask ‘Why me?’.

However, straight away, wonderful things started to happen and I couldn’t help but feel that actually, I am a very blessed, lucky girl.  In the early days of my diagnosis some truly great friends and family gave me so much love and support, that the bad thoughts slipped away.

My friend Lucy rushed to my bed side and took on the role as my PA.  My friend Mary turned up at the hospital unannounced to be with me.  My brother sat by my bed, ready to provide whatever I needed.  My Mum and Boyfriend dropped everything and raced down the A1 to get to me.  My fellow Mashers in the office made a card with Jack Bauer on it.  My housemates packed up some of my belongings and hand delivered them to me.  And then there were the flowers, the gorgeous flowers that arrived from so many supportive faces.

The night I came home from hospital we had a mini party with some of my friends and family.  All I wanted to eat was duck, so we got duck.  All I wanted to drink was wine (unsurprisingly!), so we got wine.  I started to think maybe if I was going to start getting my own way all the time, maybe this wouldn’t be so bad (!).  As I looked around the living room, I couldn’t help but feel an overwhelming sense of happiness to see all the faces of wonderful people that were rallying round me.

From that moment on, I was determined to stay firmly on the bright side of life and fight for the silver lining at the bottom of all of this.

At the same time, my housemate Holly went to a Craft afternoon and made a sock monkey.  When she got home, Holly gave me her monkey and it was love at first sight.  The monkey just made me really, really, really laugh – it was so cute!  It put such a huge smile on my face and made me so happy that I took it everywhere with me,  everywhere.  It was my good luck charm, my mascot, my friend.  From then on, it was me and the monkey against Cancer together.

I found out I would have to have chemotherapy treatment which involves 6 hours in the hospital so toxic drugs can be fed into me and attack the cancer. 6 hours? How boring! Holly suggested that I start making sock monkeys while I was going through treatment to keep me occupied and keep me occupied.  When Doctors told me that I would need 4 months of chemo, we realised that not only would I lose my hair, but that a lot of monkeys could be made!

Everybody needs a sock monkey...

The NHS kindly offer one free wig for all cancer patients but they made me look a bit like a shop mannequin (!) and were not very nice.  I discovered that a beautiful looking wig could cost anywhere from £500 – £3000, a lot more than I could afford.  And then it dawned on us.  Everyone we’d shown had loved the sock monkeys and wanted one of their own.  We could sell the monkeys to help raise money for the wig AND raise money for the Lymphoma Association AND spread the joy of the monkeys!

And so it was…Monkeys for Maddie was born…and I haven’t looked back.

The message behind the monkeys is that behind every dark cloud, there is a silver lining.

I’ll be keeping you updated on my progress through the Mash blog but in the meantime, please do visit us at http://www.monkeysformaddie.com/ to order your own sock monkey. We also NEED MORE SOCKS to monkey up so please post them to me at the address given or if you just want to say hello then please do at: monkeysformaddie@googlemail.com

The more colourful the sock, the more personality your sock monkey has!

Here Frank Wainwright – in his Best Practice series in the monthly Field Marketing magazine -  assesses the value that the best reps can bring to a temporary campaign.

Tactical field marketing and just about all experiential activities draw their staff from the same available workforce, a staff army who are often still referred to by some of the industry old guard as promogirls.  More correctly they are promotional staff, field representatives and brand ambassadors.

The last term, brand ambassadors, is the preferred term for most agencies these days.  It is a term which is designed to reinforce the quality message.  It says “we don’t just sling bodies into the field for you, we provide level-headed brand advocates”.

People are imperfect and quality will definitely differ.  So how can you tell the difference between an agency that provides true ambassadors and one that just says they do?  There are checks you can make, and if you don’t make those checks then you risk sending brand loafers out where you’d been promised ambassadors.  The checks can be performed as part of the pitch process.

In my experience RFIs often ask numerous wasteful questions about agency philosophy and internal procedure but ask virtually no useful questions about staff.  Staffing questions will not only give you a realistic expectation of field performance but also show up more about the responsibility of the agency than 00 other bland questions.

“Where will the staff come from and why?” is a good place to start.  Staff will sometimes be directly employed by the same agency that is devising the strategy.  Sometimes they will outsource the job to a specialist staffing agency.  Both routes have their merits.  The next question should be “What is the employment procedure and how quickly do the staff get paid?”

Once a campaign is underway, speaking directly to reps in action on your work is invariably useful.  The reps owe no allegiance to any one agency and a good performer will have been through plenty of employers until they have enough work to pick and choose.  They will soon tell you about past bad experiences.  A typical complaint is the waiting time prior to getting paid, a process that can drag on for months.

At the core there is a key best practice question for clients here too.  All field and experiential marketing relies on cashflow and because this is a people business the knock-on effects of clients who don’t pay on time is more severe than in other forms of advertising.  Agencies can be put under undue cashflow pressure and in the worst instances, pay for the reps who have carried out the work can be delayed.

Nevertheless there are definitely agencies that have a reputation by key regular reps in the industry as bad payers on a regular basis.  These regulars are often the reps who love promotional work and understand brand values.  They can make a significant impact on campaign success.  These reps find their preferred staffing agencies and won’t go back to the bad payers.  So, where they go is often an indicator of quality of both the performance and the administration process at the agency.

Top Masher :: Fay Harvey

Fay Harvey is a brand ambassador who takes on a wide range of work, choosing to work for three agencies in advance of the rest – Mash, Tribe and Method Two.  She has been in the industry for 5 years, enough time to know where not to go.

Fay’s work for staffing agency Mash takes her to Dubai and Rome helping to host B2B events for airport supplier Arinc and on sampling/experiential activities for brands such as Jordans or The Natural Confectionery Company.  Some of this work, including TNCC, originated through the agency Sledge who use Mash for much of their staffing.  She estimates that she does 80 per cent of her work for Mash.

Fay sampling for the successful Jordans campaign

For Method Two, Fay has been working on a Wolf Blass wine sampling activity – work which has seen her attending rugby internationals this winter and will make her a prime participant in the forthcoming Ashes series this Summer.

For Tribe, Fay has been providing the public with knowledge of the plans for NHS development in London boroughs, gaining feedback for the authorities on the popularity of their plans.

This schedule is the perfect illustration as to why good promotional people enjoy their work.  It offers enormous variety and scope.  I spoke to Fay on a day when she was not working – also a guilty pleasure.  “I really enjoy the work that I do” she says, “and to an extent I also get to pick and choose the days that I work”.  Fay is full of praise for her current roster of employers, just as they praise her, and she will be nobody’s fool.  She doesn’t go back to agencies that mess her around and she discourages others from doing so.  Staff in the industry inevitably overlap a lot, and so better operators get to know where to choose to work.  “Pay rates in the industry are fairly uniform”, she says, “so you choose where to work based on how quickly they pay and by who you will work with”.  The reference to who you will work with intrigued me.  “It’s about doing a good professional job as a team”, she says “with Mash you will see everyone on the same job working with the same positive attitude.  You don’t get that everywhere.  Sometimes there will be people there who don’t want to be.  It can have the effect of holding the whole team back”. Mash, she points out, make themselves close to reps, using newsletters and running incentive competitions building a club atmosphere.

TNCC Activity :: Created by Sledge :: Implemented and staffed by Mash

I speak to reps on a regular basis and always ask them about their work in stores and stations and at events.  Fay confirmed for me what I have heard on numerous other occasions, there are two types of rep available, brand ambassadors and brand loafers.  As consumers we have all been on the end of positive and indifferent brand experiences.

The encouraging news for brand owners is that there are more and more genuine brand ambassadors available.  They are creative people who see promotional work as a career that supports their other creative talents.  Fay is a dancer, a musician who dislikes working in offices.  Karen Laubscher, our 2008 field rep of the year combines sampling and sales work with her demanding parenting role.

Getting the best faces to your brand will make a huge difference to the success of the campaign.  Setting out cashflow principles between yourself and the agency from the off and asking pertinent staffing questions at pitch stage is a good way of controlling and making sure that the clever creative ideas translate into positive impact at street level.

My perspective on this is quality of serve will ultimately come down to the individual communicating to the consumer.

The fundamental quality driver in any consumer interaction is the brand ambassador tasked to deliver the ‘perfect serve’.  Our remit is to guarantee and deliver a standardised quality provision through staff that ultimately motivates a purchasing decision and brand engagement from the consumer.   There are the fundamentals that form an essential part of the preparation to succeed including correct certification, profiled brand fit, relevant and recent brand, venue and mechanic experience and thorough pre activity training; consisting of brand education, testing and activity role play.

 However, these elements are all ‘tick the box’ fundamentals in any preparation.  What we require is an engendered sense of commitment from the field team that delivers not only against the brief, but above and beyond, delivering enhanced consumer engagement that tips the balance in favour of the brand.   Brand ambassadors need to feel a sense of achievement as they implement the activity, understanding the commitment from all of the stakeholders, brand and agency, and subsequently feeling a sense of fulfilment as they deliver the ‘perfect serve’.  We achieve this in a number of ways;

• Training > In addition to the standard training, a full background on the brand, it’s marketing strategy, ambitions for the year, stakeholders etc., ensures that the brand ambassadors understand the wider picture, appreciate both the financial and resource commitments from all parties and recognise the importance of their position and our reliance on their professionalism to make the activity work.
• Incentives > An effective incentive scheme, rewarding excellence in delivery, is an excellent way of motivating the field team to deliver against objectives. Through years of experience, we have refined the way we incentivise and believe that an effective incentive scheme rewards sustained excellence rather than peak performances, continues to motivate the whole even when individuals excel, and is measured against variables aside from just sales uplift and volume of samples.
• Measurement > Effective measurement initiatives, both in the field site visits and insightful data analysis, ensure that the field teams feel both supported and driven in their delivery, proactively working with any measurement data and feedback to improve as the activity progresses.

Guaranteeing quality of serve includes a host of challenges, all requiring a systematic and considered approach to maximise the perfect serve opportunity.  The most fundamental variable in the mix is the field staff, the brand ambassadors that make or break the campaign. Understanding their challenges, proactively supporting their implementation and engendering a team spirit and commitment from them, ensures that perfect serve.

Author: Julian Johnson, Commercial Director, Mash Marketing