Do you enjoy working in a fast paced, award winning and fun environment where you can make a difference? ICAN are an award winning digital agency. For 15 years we’ve been leading the way, integrating traditional and digital marketing channels.
ICAN is seeking a User Experience (UX) Designer to join our growing web design and development offering, ICAN Web. You’ll enjoy a challenging variety of project types and working with a team of committed people who live and breathe digital projects.
A few years ago, on a cold January morning during rush hour a man walked in to a metro station in Washington DC. He was carrying a violin case. He stopped near the entrance as hundreds of busy commuters were walking in and out of the station.
He opened the violin case, carefully took out the violin and placed the open case at his feet in front of him.
Over the course of an hour he played six of the most complex and intricate pieces of classical music ever written. Read more
The PPC & Performance Media Manager will work with other Media Account Managers to plan, implement, optimise and analyse marketing activities across search engines and other performance-based digital channels. This person is key to the future growth of the agency and will be responsible for the top-to-bottom management of pay-per-click (PPC), facebook & Real Time Bidding (RTB) strategies. The ideal candidate must have experience of planning and implementing highly effective Google Adwords and Facebook campaigns and have knowledge and keen understanding of the use of RTB technologies. This role requires the ability to operate on both a strategic and tactical level, touching all aspects of performance media including campaign design, keyword management, bidding strategies, creative testing, reporting and analytics.
This is a key role in a very busy team within the agency with excellent opportunity for growth and continued career progression.
Job Specification
Act as a strong manager of the paid search requirements of all clients by tracking, reporting, and analysing all PPC initiatives and campaigns.
Develop short and long-term PPC account strategies, and implement day-to-day tactics that increase revenue, site traffic, conversions and ultimately ROI for clients.
Manage the day-to-day search marketing activities across multiple search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, Bing, etc.) including campaign planning, implementation, budget management, performance review, and optimisation of campaigns.
Responsibilities include keyword research (discovery and expansion), review and editing of ad copy, review and analysis of campaign performance metrics, and ongoing optimisation of campaigns.
Identify and report on key performance indicators, and opportunities for improvement on a regular basis.
Work closely with other Account Managers to genuinely integrate Performance Media strategies and recommendations into other campaign activity – including advertising, web development and creative development.
Have experience implementing campaigns across other performance media channels including social media channels – Facebook advertising.
Have experience with developing Real Time Bidding campaign strategies and managing these – either in house as part of an Agency Trading Desk or in partnership with external third parties as part of a managed solution.
Become a thought-leader in Performance Media understanding the hot issues and new developments in the market and applying these to help retain and grow existing clients and acquire new clients.
Drive continued innovation and best practice implementation, regularly sharing your knowledge with Media Managers, the Web Projects Team and the wider agency.
Knowledge & Skills
Min. 3+ years experience managing paid search programmes for well-established clients.
Should hold some combination of the following certifications: Google Adwords Certification, Google Analytics Certification.
Fundamental knowledge and experience with web analytical tools and interfaces, i.e. Google Analytics.
Requires hands-on knowledge of best practices in PPC and a proven track-record of delivering qualified traffic from both an acquisition and conversion point of view.
Strong analytical skills with ability to drive meaningful actions and insights from data.
The ability to clearly and concisely articulate results, insights and recommendations – internally to colleagues and externally to clients – both verbally and in written form.
Ability to directly liaise with clients to update them on campaign performance and manage client expectations.
Proficiency in MS Office (especially Word, Excel and PowerPoint.)
Ability to multi-task and prioritise in a fast-paced and dynamic work environment.
An organised individual with great attention to detail and focus on quality of results.
A self-motivated individual; a good team player.
Takes accountability and ownership of his/her own work.
The future is here. Google recently released their latest ad for the next big thing, Google Glass, and the digital world is heading for yet another huge change in the next few years.
According to Isabell Olsson, an engineer on the Google Glass Project, the company created the glasses for people to interact with the virtual world without distracting them from the physical world. She said that they had had two broad goals in mind: communications through images and quick access to information.
(Source: firstpost.com)
The new smart glasses will operate on the Android operating system and have a camera, a microphone and a small screen top right that will give you Terminator-type vision – but in a friendlier way.
Streets ahead of today’s smart phones, tablets, and modern computing devices, these new smart glasses will apparently provide a vast amount of benefits for individuals, businesses, cities, healthcare, and the environment. They’ll change the behaviour and lives of early adoptors and the next generation.
The camera will enable you to capture fleeting moments and allow others to see the world through your eyes. You’ll have the ability to get directions as you go, see texts and video chat, identify products and shop online, augment reality to make playing video games more realistic and interact with billboards and places of interest through the glasses.
Even everyday actions will become easier, like watching a cooking demo as you cook or preventing embarrassing moments – as a helpful pop-up identifies and reminds you of someone’s name. Businesses will benefit too – sales will grow as people interact with as their company, product or service through the glasses.
This is stirring up privacy panic in some quarters as some people believe that Google Glass will have more sinister consequences.
Privacy concerns
A website called Stop the Cyborgs has sprung up with its stated mission to “stop a future in which privacy is impossible and corporate control total.”
They ask whether you would ever have considered wearing a hidden spy camera or recording conversations a few years ago? Will everyone will be doing it soon and finding you odd for objecting?
They’re concerned that there’s no way to know if you are being recorded by someone wearing Google Glasses or a similar device. Very different to a smart phone where users visibly hold the camera up to take a photo or record a video.
They also raise issues about what will happen to your video and audio files. Will they be collected and processed in the cloud to display contextual information using image, object, face, voice identification and speech recognition? Will information about you just sit in a database or might it be delivered to the people you’re interacting with?
They believe there will be serious consequences for human society as the distinction between the ‘digital world’ and the ‘real world’ becomes blurred. People will make decisions and interact with other humans in the real world in a way which increasingly depends on information that Google Glass tells them.
Interestingly, Charlie Brooker’s satirical mini-series, “Black Mirror”, which ran on Channel 4 last year, taps into collective unease about our modern world and where it may be going. It’s about the path the media is taking us down. To quote Charlie Brooker “It’s about the world we live in now, and a warning of the world we will be living in 10 minutes from now”.
The name ‘Black Mirror’ comes from idea of a blank TV screen or computer monitor reflecting the world back to us.
In this dark drama, in the near future, everyone has access to a memory implant that records everything they do, see and hear – with disturbing consequences.
Sound familiar?
Check out Black Mirror – The Entire History of You Trailer here
There has always been a close relationship between advertising and the entertainment business. Movie icons have appeared in advertising and endorsed brands in one shape or form.
But while watching an advert for Galaxy Chocolate, I became a little uncomfortable with the way they have resurrected Audrey Hepburn. To be honest, I found it a little creepy. The creators have not used old footage, but recreated her entirely in CGI, which maybe adds to the creepiness.
The long-heralded mobile web is finally coming of age. No longer relegated to a second screen experience, mobile devices are commonly the first option for consumers around the world. In Ireland, Smartphone penetration is currently approaching 50% of the population and consumers are becoming increasingly reliant on their phones, with 61% accessing the Internet every day and most never leaving home without it. If your website still isn’t optimised to provide a mobile experience, you’re missing out on the huge opportunity that this presents. In fact, according to a recent study by Google, 67% of users said that a mobile friendly site makes them more likely to buy a product or use a service, with 52% declaring that a bad mobile experience made them less likely to engage with a company.
Whether your website is focussed on marketing, e-commerce or customer service it’s vital that there is a consistently good experience across all devices from desktop to tablets to the myriad of Smartphone screen sizes available. Our solution, for many clients, had been to take a mobile-first approach to producing a responsive design (using HTML5) that gives a fluid experience on any device a consumer is using. These days if a site’s not built for mobile, with a responsive web design, it will leave users feeling frustrated and they can transfer this negative emotion to your brand, leaving your site to find your competitors who have taken a mobile-first approach.
We’re thrilled to have won an award at Friday’s Digital Media Awards. We won the Best Use of Social Media Award for our work on the Jameson Irish Whiskey Global Facebook page. We’d like to thank everyone involved for all their hard work.
On top of that, we just found out we made Forbes’ Top 100 Global Ad Agencies That Know Social Media and Google. We’re delighted and humbled to be on a list with so many great agencies.
If you’d like to see what ICAN can do for your social presence, call our Business Development Director, Ciaran on 01- 7756500 or email him at ciaran@ican.ie
When people talk about best practice Search Engine Optimisation, they often refer to optimising a website by ensuring that popular (or ‘primary’) keywords feature within the page content, and maybe also within the Meta tags, such as the page title and description. Whilst these are vital parts of optimisation, a true SEO solution covers a much wider area. The key, as always, is relevance, and there are many more elements to consider other than the words people read on a web page, or see within a search engine results page.
Remember (and always bear this in mind) that the more relevant a web page is to those primary keywords and search terms, the higher it will rank. That being the case, it would seem to make perfect sense to make sure that as many parts of a web page are as relevant as possible wouldn’t it? There is an entire journey to follow when considering SEO for any web page, and we’ve broken this down into 10 main areas.
The nominations for the 2013 Digital Media Awards have been announced (http://www.digitalmedia.ie/2013-finalists) and we’re honoured to have been nominated in 8 categories as follows:
Best Digital Creative Agency
Best Integrated Digital Campaign – Digicel Online Top Up
Best Online Ad Campaign - Digicel Online Top Up
Best Website – Mater Private
Best use of Social Media – Jameson Irish Whiskey
Best Innovation – Mobile Cover
Creative Technology – Mobile Cover
Best Charity – Amnesty International
A big thank you to all involved including our terrific clients!
I set up my account for Pinterest last year having heard about the site from a number of blogs I read. I wasn’t really sure what to expect at first. Pinterest unlike Facebook or Twitter didn’t come with an intuitive user manual. It wasn’t for socialising with friends near and far like I use Facebook for or keeping up with the latest news like Twitter.
![google-glasses.top[7]](http://www.ican.ie/ican09/files/google-glasses.top7_.jpg)
![Terminator-5-r-rated[13]](http://www.ican.ie/ican09/files/Terminator-5-r-rated13.jpg)
The long-heralded mobile web is finally coming of age. No longer relegated to a second screen experience, mobile devices are commonly the first option for consumers around the world. In Ireland, Smartphone penetration is currently approaching 50% of the population and consumers are becoming increasingly reliant on their phones, with 61% accessing the Internet every day and most never leaving home without it. If your website still isn’t optimised to provide a mobile experience, you’re missing out on the huge opportunity that this presents. In fact, according to a recent study by Google, 67% of users said that a mobile friendly site makes them more likely to buy a product or use a service, with 52% declaring that a bad mobile experience made them less likely to engage with a company.
