Name: Bridget

Posts by bkendrick:

Chianti, Content and Base Metals – Marketing at FastMarkets in 2013

January 16th, 2013

2012 was a watershed year for the marketing team at FastMarkets. Not only did we increase marketing resource in the UK and America we introduced ambitious plans to improve the metals content we provide visitors and at the same time our search engine presence.

• Moving our sites onto an easy to use content management  system and a single root domain with easier uploading of videos, user guides, RSS feeds and  images  making our websites a more attractive place to spend time
• A monthly programme of base metals, minor metals and precious metals blogs which draws together our strong editorial team as well as the non-journalists among us to provide a unique viewpoint on the metal markets.
• Beefing up the rise of meta tags, titles and appropriate keywords to help search engine visibility

My marketing challenge for 2013 is to take the new platform and harness its power with the immensely talented people who work at FastMarkets – many of whom are not trained writers. And the best way of doing this that I’ve found to date is via competition.

Rewards and Competition

There’s nothing like a bit of healthy competition to get people writing – especially when a bottle of Chianti is involved. In 2012 I ran a completion for the single most read blog as well as the blogger who gained the most readers overall. I was very proud to win the first category with blog about the LME Week conference and our Senior Correspondent Kathleen Retourne won the overall readers category, her Abba based blogs and belly-dancers at the LME proving hard to beat. I hope she enjoyed the Chianti. In 2013 I plan on running quarterly and annual competitions to keep the team motivated. I think our Chief Correspondent who had promised great things, but failed to deliver the goods (i.e. blogs) is sufficiently riled up that he’s already planning an onslaught. But as they say talk is cheap….

FastMarkets content plans in 2013

I plan on using the platform we created in 2012 and taking things up a gear, with an integrated social and content marketing plan to showcase the incredibly strong editorial we have across base, precious and minor metals.  With content available in RSS feeds and a large number of video posts, blog as and demos planned I am confident that the race for the Chianti in 2013 will be a hard-fought one. Indeed seeing Kathleen’s new blonde look for 2013 I’m pretty sure she’s counting on making a huge impact on our website this year – I might even have to take a trip to the hairdressers myself.

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LME Week Seminar 2012, all glamour and technology

October 16th, 2012

Yesterday I attended my first London Metal Exchange Week Seminar. As someone who is new to the metal industry, and a marketing specialist I was very excited to meet clients, competitors and industry experts, and I wasn’t disappointed. I’m sure my more knowledgeable colleagues will post about the speeches and discussions on the economic outlooks for metal prices, supply and demand but here’s a few observations on what stood-out to me.

iPad interaction

This is the first event I’ve been too where delegates have been given an iPad to enhance the experience, and it worked really well. For some it was a novelty to play with an iPad for the first time, but it didn’t take long for everyone to start playing with the tablet, reading speaker profiles, delegate notes and agenda. During the seminar the ability to have audience polls and ask questions was much appreciated – and ensured the normally torturous question-time microphone wasn’t required. The only thing I would have liked with the app was the ability to tweet about the event, as it’s was a closed-wall app. That aside it added to the event. Well done London Metal Exchange!

Glamour girls and giveaways

Looking around the faces at the seminar I was really heartened by the diversity of the participants – it shows how business and the world has moved on, and something the industry should be proud of. Seeing glamour models dressed in tiny paper dresses trying to drum up business for metal markers publisher just seemed anachronistic and a tad inappropriate to me. Beautiful girls, a dress I’d love to wear to wear to a party, but at a professional event with a diverse audience, I’ll stick to the Reuters cuddly monkeys and LME back cabs and buses (my son says thank you).

American energy

The LME Week seminar had a normal mixed bag of speakers, all subject matter experts and all with interesting content, but some with more impact than others. The US economist bought the session to life just one of his hilarious anecdotes was comparing the US election to the file ‘Alien vs Predator, no matter who wins we all lose’. Thanks Jason Schneker!

An impressive note for the future

The LME Week seminar ended on a high, I was really impressed by Charles Li, the Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing. He spoke with clarity and focus and made me feel that the London Metal Exchange is in good hands.

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Advertising CTR by Format

September 6th, 2012

Having only joined Fastmarkets a couple of months ago, the learning curve felt a little steep at times. Fortunately, the internet is well equipped with an array of information on digital advertising. I am now learning about all the trends, developments and terminology used in the world of digital advertising, so I just thought I would share some of my findings with you.

2012 has witnessed great changes in the way Advertisers measure the success of their online advertising campaigns. Empirical evidence and tangible results on campaign performance are now as vital as ever. Fastmarkets aims to remain at the forefront of such developments, which is why I am happy to provide you with some insight into how individual banners CTR perform by format. Not only is the size of the banner important, but so is the placement of that banner – and ratecards mirror this.

I have conducted some research into how a couple of our banners perform in comparison with the industry benchmarks. The results indicated that our ‘belly band’ banner performs better than the banner at the top of the page. Our ‘belly band’ banner measured a CTR of 0.18%, the top zone banner received a lower CTR of 0.05%.

I used Google Double Click to measure the industry standards for those banners and this confirmed that all our advertising CTR still perform at the industry standard or above. In summary, what this shows is that across the display industry the bigger the ad and the better placed it is the better it will perform, albeit at a higher cost.

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FastMarkets Free to view content in app form

August 31st, 2012

Fastmarkets are delighted to announce that the free to read news and blog content from this site is now available within the Google Currents app in magazine format for you to enjoy on your Android and Apple devices.



Google Currents is an industry-leading reading device provides our content for high speed offline reading and quick-touch sharing. It adapts itself to differently sized phones and tablets, with your FastMarkets edition synchronized across device.

To download the FastMarkets magazine edition onto your mobile phone or tablet via Google Currents just click here, as you’d expect from Google it’s simple to set-up. If you haven’t got the link to hand when you install the app them just search for FastMarkets within the app.

At FastMarkets we are committed to making ur content available in as many different places and formats. We are working on a mobile version of our paid for content and will be looking at our own app requirements, but we also know that content shouldn’t be limited to one format, so have enabled our free content as RSS feeds and now within reader apps.

If you want more information on our paid for professional services please request a free trial.

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How to start a career

June 22nd, 2012

I’ve just spent an enjoyable few hours putting together an induction and training plan for the graduate who’s joining us next week as our Advertising and Sales Executive. I feel a real sense of responsibility doing this, as this role will provide a career springboard for a talented and enthusiastic young person, as well as being a crucial role to achieve our corporate goals. We deliberately chose to employ graduate, to give them an amazing start to their working lives.

As such I can’t help but remember back to my own first role (far too many years ago for me to own up to). Being on the graduate training scheme of a major High Street bank meant I enjoyed amazing formal training, the chance to work with incredibly talented people, and the ability to work in varied departments before choosing my area of specialism. It wasn’t all good though, one of my early managers told me straight out that, ‘I don’t like graduates, they stop people without degrees getting on’ – so that was a comfortable six month placement then! A branch manager refused me entry into their bank because I was wearing trousers (as one colleague said you had to wear a skirt so he could get his hands up there), and one placement involved an audit where a staff member was found to have siphoned customer funds. I remember feeling uncomfortable and confused about my career choice, and when a marketing role came up in Head Office I jumped at it. That decision has dictated the course of my professional life, the marketing team blew me away with their intelligence, passion for results and the joy of the creative process created a love of marketing and I’ve never looked back.

So what does this mean for our graduate? Well as the person responsible for increasing and optimising third party advertising on our sites, providing account management and advertising consultancy for our clients this role is incredibly important to our growth. But I am also aware of my responsibility to provide a professional foundation which will provide career options and nurture the intelligence, passion and raw talent we saw at interview. I’ve got our new starter spending  time on the floor of the London Metal Exchange, visiting the Online Marketing Show and attending a full-on sales training course – as well as the usual inductions, introduction to web systems and password mountain that we all go through in a new job. Ultimately I want Emma to write a blog in 20 years time that thanks FastMarkets for the opportunity we’re giving her.

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