Building marketshare and skills were at the centre of the news last week. A potential Twitter takeover, Lastminute’s purchase of WAYN and a report that the standard of UK Digital Marketing skills has taken a U-turn for the worst. Run your eyes past last week’s news and make sure you’re on top of what matters.

Don't forget to join the next Ecommerce Club Working Lunch London: The Art of Possibility: Small but Mighty! taking pllace on Tuesday 18th October at the newly opened design space, Clerkenwell London.

There has always been a common thought that smaller ecommerce brands are limited when it comes to expansion. Especially when developing from a multi-channel to an omni-channel level, a process seen as resource heavy and complicated.

But what if that wasn’t the case and it was possible to have a successful omni-channel brand that could compete with the bigger brands and the established retailers. Join the Ecommerce Club and our new partners Lightspeed, who will be explaining how consolidating cross channel business information could help simplify processes, maximise profitability and increase customer loyalty for all the SME or start-up retailers out there.

We will also be announcing a live case study with our second speaker, Charlotte Zimbehl, who runs a contemporary womenswear brand specialising in outerwear. Charlotte is happy to share the trials and tribulations of being a young brand and will openly work with the partners of Ecommerce Club and our retail members using their technology, services and expertise to see where we can help take her brand. (Please note all Ecommerce Club lunches are for retailers only, no vendors or consultants)

We look forward to seeing you soon

Charlie Lines

Director

Mixing Digital

Adobe data showed that while demand for computers and TV’s was up in May and June YoY – 33 and 28 per cent respectively – growth in July slowed to 16 percent and turned negative in August with a 10 per cent YoY decrease in sales, likely due to Brexit and other factors driving uncertainty in Europe.

A new test revels that only seven percent of UK Marketing professionals have satisfactory digital marketing skills. This is according to a new test conducted by the Digital Marketing Institute, where the average score was 37 percent..

Mobile ad revenue continues to grow and has increased 68.2 per cent to €37 billion ($49 billionn) in 2015 from €22 billion ($29 billion) in 2014, according to new research by IAB Europe and HIS. The research also revealed that mobile display continues to outpace search and grew by an exponential 92.6 per cent to €19 billion ($26 billion).

Shares in the social networking platform Twitter have skyrocketed by more than 20% following a report saying Twitter had received take-over bids.

Facebook has been accused of inflating a key video performance metric. In a recent post by The Wall Street Journal, it revealed that Facebook’s metric for the average time users spent watching videos only allowed for views of more than three seconds, eliminating a large number of very brief views.

Lastminute has purchased the social travel network WYAN, to enhance its online content across the group’s travel sites. This is part of its strategy to assist advertisers in telling integrated stories through powerful content

According to a report from the Collective’s 2016 UK Online Video Advertising Market Report, advertisers and buyers are moving away from a focus on bigger, traditional pre-roll video towards buying more strategic and diverse video solutions.

A new quarterly digital title Faraday launched last Thursday and was distributed at 10 London Tube stations. The magazine is being created to bring people together and talk about new technology that could enhance their everyday lives.

Big brands including Google, Unilever, Facebook, Proctor and Gamble and many more are connecting in the fight to tackle the reasons for ad blocking. The brands are joining together to defend the consumers choice to use ad blocking software to filter out ads on the web.