3 ‘fresh’ stories that you need to know about today – HotelTonight,The Blueberry Wave, Kognitio, Littlewoods
HotelTonight Hires Beats Music and King.com Marketing Pro as CMO
Leading mobile-only hotel booking app adds Mark Phillips to its executive team, appoints Zillow’s Amy Bohutinsky to board and brings on former Airbnb executive to lead international expansion
London, 7th November 2014 – HotelTonight, the leading mobile-only hotel booking app, today announced that Mark Phillips, former CMO of Beats Music, has joined the company as its Chief Marketing Officer.
Phillips joins the HotelTonight team with nearly 20 years’ experience building and developing global consumer and technology brands. Most recently, Phillips led marketing for Beats Music, the subscription-based music streaming service that was recently acquired by Apple.
He built up their marketing team and successfully launched the service in January of 2014 with a partnership with Ellen DeGeneres, a Super Bowl spot and brand and performance campaigns featuring Trent Reznor. Prior to Beats, Phillips was VP of Brand Marketing at King.com, where he helped guide Candy Crush’s meteoric rise and build King’s brand before the company went public in April 2014. Phillips also brings an international background in advertising and marketing to HotelTonight, including leading Adidas’ marketing campaign for the London 2012 Olympics and their highly awarded global Impossible is Nothing campaign.
HotelTonight also shared today that it has appointed Amy Bohutinsky, Chief Marketing Officer at Zillow, to its Board of Directors. Bohutinsky joined Zillow pre-launch in 2005, and built the brand and marketing team from the ground up. Today, Zillow is the largest online and mobile real estate brand, with nearly 90 million unique users per month. Before Zillow, Bohutinsky ran communications at Hotwire, and began her career as a broadcast journalist for various ABC and NBC affiliates.
The Blueberry Wave teams up with Kognitio to dramatically reduce ‘big data’ processing time from 1 hour to 1 minute
Award-winning data marketing agency The Blueberry Wave have made significant leaps in dramatically improving their data processing time by teaming up with supercomputing specialists Kognitio.
The new system has seen The Blueberry Wave switch from traditional Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP) to Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) which has transformed data processing time; on average, what previously took one hour to process now takes just 1 minute.
The Cotswolds-based agency is responsible for streaming hundreds of millions of data records for their clients on a daily basis.
However, with overnight batch processing jobs under pressure to complete in time for the next working day, the firm quickly identified that no amount of code or data manipulation in their traditional SQL environment would enable them to speed up the process of delivering refreshed systems before the start of the working day and support the exponential increase in data its clients were presenting.
Steve Schneekloth, Consultant at The Blueberry Wave, explained: “With digital channels exploding and real-time technology evolving at an ever increasing pace, we are being swamped with huge volumes of less structured data needing immediate interpretation and response.
Littlewoods gets into the festive spirit with integrated panto campaign
Online retailer Littlewoods, a Shop Direct Group brand, will embark on a week-long teaser campaign with ITV to launch its Christmas pantomime-themed advertising activity.
The ads form part of a fully integrated campaign, developed and implemented with media agency Vizeum, to showcase the brand’s ‘Make you Christmas Wishes Come True with Littlewoods’ proposition. Two 10” spots will air during a range of ITV programmes including Coronation Street and The Great Fire to promote a brand competition between 2 and 6 November.
The winners will then be revealed in a 20”ad competition during the first ad break of the Coronation Streets’ 7 November episode before the launch of the full 40” Christmas ad. This TV content will then be supported with targeted Sky AdSmart ads and a partnership with another key ITV Show I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out of Herefrom 19 November. A further sponsorship deal with Movies 24 and Movies 24+ will see the two channels rebranded to Christmas 24 and Christmas 24+ to bring the brand closer to the families across the UK.
In line with the creative, Littlewoods will also sponsor Pantomimes across 10 different sites throughout the UK by partnering with the Ambassador Theatre Group. As part of the deal, Littlewoods branding will feature in auditorium AV screens, online platforms, printed products and point-of-sales.
The brand will also take the festive spirit out to the streets of the UK with an immersive outdoor Aladdin themed experience in London, Birmingham, Liverpool and Glasgow shopping centre hubs.