This ad from John Lewis Dixons is definitely a marmite moment. You either love it or you hate it. Ads that polarise opinion and create debate (admittedly that’s still mainly within the media) are a welcome refreshing change. For Dixons this can only be a encouraging sign that this particular campaign is working harder than most.

Tim Whirldedge points out on his blog this campaign has created an interesting tone of voice for Dixons based on brutal honesty. Others like Ruth Mortimer at Marketing Week have been more sceptical of Dixons decision to undermine competitor brands. It’s a ballsy move, not every brand is prepared to sell itself on widely known values that haven’t always reflected positively.

I’ve written previously about how electrical retailers are embracing new forms of customer service. I admire this campaign for the distinct opportunity it has created for Dixons. Yes, in a recession hugely competitive price points are sustaining sales numbers but for how long will Dixons be able to ignore a customer service approach?

It’s no secret that Best Buy’s entrance in the UK is just around the corner. In the US they are renowned for their high levels of customer satisfaction and have built the brand around this. It will be interesting to see how consumers react to Dixons.

John Lewis have already publicly commented on this campaign. Rightly or wrongly this campaign has stimulated debate around the brands involved. Do you love or hate it? How does this make you feel about Dixons? Do you admire their pluckiness or are they making a mistake? Who makes the most of this and how they do it promises to be very interesting indeed.

We spend a lot of time here at Republic pushing the idea of community and getting the message out organically. It’s the enthusiasm for a subject that helps drive content, not just the brand name. Once, that was the idea behind viral videos but these days they just seem to be an extension of TV advertising, or are they?

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The business of display advertising can be fiendishly tricky. A recent report in the Telegraph revealed that even the all conquering social networks are finding it difficult to engage users attention with advertising clients.

Liane Dietrich, managing director of LinkShare, the affiliate network which conducted the research, said:

“Less than 10 per cent of our respondents are interacting with adverts across social networking sites…Online users are information shoppers – they are looking for buyer reviews – so adverts need relay more information to cater for this need”.

This serves as a good reminder to all that at its heart the internet is a service led business. The most successful sites are those that are consistently providing useful information to their customers.

This obviously is easier said than done and even Google can sometimes get it wrong. Recently I’ve been exploring their Ad-sense channel via YouTube and came across this particularly illuminating comment.

“Hey Google instead of these ads for your Google products how about you give instruction instead. That’s what people search YouTube for, not to see an ad”.

Wouldn’t it be great if more people actually searched for ads. Perhaps a good lesson for us all, remember advertising needs to be useful!

It’s no secret that I work surrounded by laptops and netbooks and can often be seen working off two different machines at the same time. I’m kind of like the Rick Wakeman of laptops just without the cape! It’s a side-effect of reviewing more portables in the last decade than just about anyone else out there. These days, I work off an Apple Mac and a Windows machine at the same time, making sure everything ticks along nicely.

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One of the questions we get asked a lot around here is ‘what’s the next big thing after Twitter?’ It’s a good question but I think also a double-edged one – do we really need the next Big Thing when even the current one isn’t truly mainstream yet? Also, by asking what it will be already consigns Twitter to last year’s fad. However, in the name of research, the question has been bandied around internally and there are a number of contenders on the table. However the most novel seems to be Plurk…

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