Content articles Quad Digital London

by Yigal Chazan

Can Native Ads Offer Newspapers a Lifeline?

February 19, 2015 in Content , Content Creation , Content Marketing

Newspapers online-002 Newspaper publishers have long struggled to come up with an answer to plunging advertising revenues that have threatened to kill off their industry. While it may not be a panacea, the emergence of native advertising in recent years has provided significant revenue streams, calming the nerves of executives and journalists anxious about the future. Read the rest of this entry →

Tags: branded content , editorial content , native ads , native advertising , sponsored content No Comments »

by Emma Krstic

Clickbait: Can brands and publishers learn from it?

February 12, 2015 in Content , Content Creation , Content Marketing , Social

Clickbait is taking over the world, and it’s not good news for media organisations. While respected news publications are still working out how to make profits online, social media sites are awash with clickbait, luring streams of traffic to their websites by piquing people’s curiosity, and making huge profits through advertising revenue. Read the rest of this entry →

Tags: brands , clickbait , content , content path , digital content , , publishers , social media , traffic No Comments »

by Emma Krstic

The social media storm that is Movember

November 14, 2014 in Content , Content Creation , Content Marketing , Social

It’s November, and all around the world men are sporting facial hair. It’s the ultimate masculine accessory of the moment, but it’s also an image which men’s health charity Movember tapped into and promoted long ago for its annual fundraiser. This was before facial hair – moustaches to be precise – were considered cool.

Every year, in November, Movember turns moustaches into a symbol of support for its cause. But given their widespread popularity, this year they’ve adopted a different tack – convincing men to clean shave their bushy faces and start from scratch for November.

Do you think they’ve succeeded? Read the rest of this entry →

Tags: marketing campaign , movember , Quad , shareable content , social media , social strategy , user-generated content No Comments »

by Yigal Chazan

A winning formula for company blogs

October 23, 2014 in Blogging , Content , Content Creation

They have the potential to be powerful marketing weapons – retaining customers, acquiring new ones, increasing brand recognition and providing strong material for PR campaigns. So why do so many company blogs struggle to deliver?

While there’s no definitive answer, we at Quad have a pretty good idea of what’s going wrong. At the heart of the problem is a fundamental misconception of what a blog is for. As a journalist, I know the importance of writing for an audience. If you don’t produce stories they want to read, they’ll go elsewhere. And if their interest and tastes change, you have to adapt to cater for them. Read the rest of this entry →

Tags: blogging , company blog , company blogs , marketing blogs , Quad Digital No Comments »

by Isobel Weiner

Quad Digital expertise supports literacy campaign

June 26, 2014 in Content , Content Creation , Design , Quad

With the National Literacy Trust’s campaign about to begin, we at Quad are buzzing with excitement and anticipation.

From next week, you’ll be able to follow a trail of open book-shaped benches across London, each featuring the cover of an influential novel or children’s book, painted by some of the UK’s leading artists. We volunteered to build and design the website for the cause, since its aim of improving literacy is a subject close to our heart. Read the rest of this entry →

Tags: art , Books , content marketing , london , Quad , Quad Digital , SEO , Social , website No Comments »

by Lola Olson

The importance of building content infrastructure

May 28, 2014 in Content , Design , Quad

Much of content marketing focuses on brand and audience building. But when you’re building an audience you need an infrastructure around which it can gather. Here at Quad , we have an in-house development team who work with our clients to create the best platform for the content their audience is going to engage with.

Above is a perfect example of an infrastructure we’re very proud of. The website we built for Wimbledon Studios allows visitors to see all aspects of its business: the sets, the catering, its capacity for events and more. The blog also gives Wimbledon the opportunity to engage with potential location managers, event organisers, and other professionals who want to know what Wimbledon Studios offers that other facilities don’t. Without this platform, the content we create for Wimbledon would struggle to be seen.

Most of the content created off-site directs traffic back toward the website and that’s why building a solid infrastructure is so key. Writing excellent copy for Wimbledon Studios’ website and for other sites wouldn’t work effectively if there wasn’t a central hub for the audience to come to.

We’ve written before about our work with Books About Town, the partnership between the National Literacy Trust and Wild In Art designed to encourage reading for enjoyment. Their BookBenches celebrating stories linked to London are soon to be unveiled for the summer. To mark this launch we’ve created a platform that encourages exploration and sends readers on their own BookBench finding adventure.

Books About Town has truly great content to share. The process of painting and placing new BookBenches provides important opportunities for pictures, tweets, and lively discussion. Below you’ll see our own contribution to this collection of excitingly decorated street furniture.

There are lively interactions between us, the artist Mandii Pope, Books about Town, the National Literacy Trust and others in the location where our BookBench will be placed. All of this is directed back to the infrastructure of the Books About Town website. Without that infrastructure the readers interested in this story have no place to go.

If you need an infrastructure for your audience to live in from this content marketing agency , we can help. Call us on , drop us a line at or tweet us. We’re @QuadDigital.

Tags: content marketing , Quad No Comments »

by Lola Olson

Audience building for Books About Town

April 15, 2014 in Content , Design , Quad

If you’ve been following us on Twitter, you may have heard we’re working with Books About Town, a collaboration between the National Literacy Trust and Wild In Art to encourage reading for enjoyment. Based in London, the Books About Town plans include a series of sponsored BookBenches, designed by top artists and celebrating stories linked to the capital. The benches, shaped to resemble open books, will start popping up around London this July. Read the rest of this entry →

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by Lola Olson

SEO-based approaches are marketing snake oil

April 8, 2014 in Content , SEO

Snake-oil Despite about the dangers of guest blogging with links, many companies are still interested in using this form of content marketing to boost SEO. It does make sense. It’s always been difficult to measure ROI on marketing. Just because a certain amount of people see a billboard or an advert doesn’t guarantee you’ll see a boost in sales.

SEO provides a result. It’s easier to measure in terms of a number, a position on a Google search or an improvement in a keyword. But the reality is that using only SEO as a measure of ROI is the equivalent of marketing snake oil.

It’s great if you’re on the top ten Google results for a certain search term. That does put you in the face of a lot of customers who wouldn’t otherwise know about you. But it’s not everything. It’s not building an audience. It’s not building a brand. What we encourage our clients to understand is that they don’t just need to focus on boosting their ranks in search engines, but building an audience behind their brand.

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by Ben Dickens

Promotion and using influencers to build your audience; the ASA speaks

March 19, 2014 in Blogging , Content , Content Marketing , Editor's Picks , Quad

A key aspect of the work we do at Quad is driving awareness of our clients’ content and brands. After all, we can publish the best content in the world on their websites and promote it on their social but that’s often seen by just a small section of the potential audience.

That’s where our digital communication and promotion arm comes into play. Quad’s team-within-a-team is dedicated to helping our stories reach as wide an audience as possible, so we can engage more people and bring them to our clients’ owned media. Think of them as a mad hybrid of media buyer, planner, PR person and promotional expert working on the myriad digital platforms that exist.

But that’s all marketing speak.

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by Toby Bourne

Five questions that say yes to content marketing

March 18, 2014 in Blogging , Content , SEO

I’ve been taking a good look at Eric Enge’s pieces on Search Engine Watch recently. They make it absolutely clear why content marketing is such a compelling proposition for brands and why older link building practices have become a genuine liability.

Matt Cutts, Google’s head of webspam and the public face of its search quality team – the SEO police if you like – said this recently when asked by Enge what the best link building strategy was:

“ Make a fantastic website that people love and tell their friends about and link to and want to experience. As a result, your website starts to become stronger and stronger in the rankings.”

The same is true of all your online content.

Read the rest of this entry →

Tags: content marketing No Comments »