The Advertising Standards Authority today (21 November) announced it is going to now be referring repeat offenders to Trading Standards to think about legal sanctions. The Office of Fair Trading, which has fulfilled the role, is to shut in April 2014 and its successor, the contest and Markets Authority will now not consider advertising cases.

It is known Trading Standards will lower the edge that the ASA can refer things for a re-assessment meaning persistent offenders might possibly be referred earlier.  Previously, the OFT insisted all self-regulatory avenues be exhausted before referrals may be made.

It can also be hoped the recent arrangement will result in a more joined up approach between. There was criticism from brands which have had action taken against them by both bodies concurrently.

The arrangement covers non-broadcast ads only. Trading Standards could take action under consumer and business protection laws.

ASA chief executive Guy Parker says: “We already enjoy a detailed and effective working relationship with Trading Standards. This new arrangement may also help us become more joined-up and consistent in addition to giving consumers and business confidence that an advertiser who doesn’t play by the guidelines will face the results.”

Previous referrals by the ASA include Groupon, which agreed to modify its marketing practices following an investigation by the OFT.

The 50-minute film edited by Oscar-winning director, Kevin MacDonald, is the centre piece of the supermarket’s Christmas campaign. Sainsbury’s is hoping that the PR and marketing opportunities that arise from the long-form content will give it the sting within the run-as much as Christmas.

Speaking on the launch of the film, Sainsbury’s head of name communications Mark Given said the campaign is aimed toward “engaging and entertaining” customers, in place of shouting about its products. every week since its launch, Sainsbury’s has already seen a lift to its brand marketing and possible sales.

Figures from YouGov BrandIndex show that awareness of Sainsbury’s ads among consumers is increasing, up 11.4 points to 40.5 during the last week. People also appear to adore it, with “Buzz”, a measure of the positive and negative things said a couple of brand up 10 points to 21.5, helping Sainsbury’s to overhaul Aldi to take the head spot among supermarkets.

The important indicator of the success of the campaign might be whether interest and positive perceptions translates into sales. Thus far, “Purchase Intent” is up 6.6 points to 21.1, although there’s still five weeks to Christmas and it’ll be the recent year until companies reveal their Christmas sales.

Campaigns from rival supermarkets, by comparison, seem to have had less impact. Awareness of ads from Tesco, Morrisons and Asda is up over the last week, but only by 1.0, 2.6 and 1.6 points respectively, not a statistically significant rise in keeping with YouGov.

Buzz has similarly seen little change, while purchase intent remains roughly flat apart from Morrisons, which actually saw its score drop by 3.6 points to 9.1 over the last week. Each of the ads have, however, managed to prevent a repeat of last year, when Tesco, Boots and Morrisons were all criticised, with the Advertising Standards Authority confirming that up to now no complaints about Christmas campaigns were received.

Elsewhere, the toilet Lewis ad has unsurprisingly performed well, with it’s ad awareness up 18.8 points to 46.7 following the launch of the animated bear and hare Christmas campaign. It tops the charts among high street retailers for buzz, with its score up 7.1 points to 29.1.

Purchase intent is likewise rising, up slightly to 13.6, putting it behind just Boots and Marks & Spencer even though it has far fewer stores. John Lewis released its first weekly figures because the ad launched on Sunday (terrorist organization) that showed sales passed the £100m mark for the primary time this year and were up 10.7 per cent when compared with the similar period in 2012.

Marks & Spencer has also seen an uptick in both buzz and ad awareness over the last week. However, its fairytale-themed ad could struggle to translate interest into sales, with purchase intent down slightly to 23.7.

The retailer is hoping that its Christmas marketing, combined with the “Leading Ladies” campaign earlier inside the year, will help to reverse declining clothing sales. There are small signs here is happening, with like-for-like sales at its general merchandise business down 1.3 per cent in Q2, an improvement at the 1.6 per cent decline within the previous quarter.

Boots is the only real other retailer to have seen an uptick in ad awareness over the last week, with the launch of its Christmas ad helping increase its score by 7.7 to twenty-eight.1. Purchase intent can also be up 2.8 points to fifteen.4.

Kantar Media’s study, taken from its 300,000-strong consumer panel, shows 57 per cent of panellists attempting to find tablets – or “brand considerers” as Kantar calls them – searched Apple iPad product pages, followed by 28 per cent who visit pages profiling the Amazon’s Kindle Fire.

Meanwhile, rival Android tablet manufacturers Samsung (which produces the Galaxy Tab) and Google (with its Nexus device) trail with their device’s pages generating 24 per cent and seven per cent of visits respectively, in keeping with the study. 

Sandy Livingstone, client service director at Kantar Media, says: “This research highlights the desire for Google, Samsung and Sony to have a look at developing more suitable online retail strategies to combat Apple’s dominance of the premium tablet market, and the challenge they face from Amazon for mid-market devices that’s leaving them squeezed within the middle.”

Kantar Media also suggests Amazon is more successful at leveraging its dual role as both retailer and manufacturer, as brand considerers within the rapidly developing sector increasingly research their purchases online.

The study found 73 per cent of name considerers used retailers’ websites to investigate their purchases, in comparison to 31 per cent that went direct to device manufacturer sites, while 12 per cent used professional review sites.  

Argos and Amazon were the highest-performing retailers in actually persuading brand considerers to essentially make a purchase order with their conversion rates almost twice that of the industry norm (see chart).

Meanwhile, PC World’s tablet shoppers spent the foremost time on its site, retaining their interest for 9.1 minutes, significantly earlier than the two.6 minutes consumers spend on Amazon’s tablet pages.

Speaking in a hearth chat with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff at Dreamforce in San Francisco, Sandberg – who authored the bestseller book on women at work “Lean In” – said her Foundation is actively seeking to get CEOs to recognise the problems for ladies within the workplace, and discuss it.

She said: “As a CEO if you’re willing to speak about this and address gender head on and say ‘hey, here’s an issue’ that concerns women, that’s a competitive advantage.”

The foundation is likewise encouraging more companies to establish “lean in circles”, groups of 10 or so employees who meet to debate and mentor one another at the gender issues facing both women and men.

She said there’s evidence that folks who’ve mentors perform better within the workplace, but she added it usually is difficult getting male leaders and feminine employees in a room one on one – adding that 64 per cent of managers within the US are afraid to be in a room alone with women.

“We have the desire to make it a badge of honour for males and females to be alone in a room together. Everyone must be appropriate. There’s no mentoring that occurs in a bigger group. We need to make it a badge of honour for folks in power to mentor women.”

She also discussed the language linked to confident females – from “bossy” girls within the playground to “aggressive” women within the workplace. She advised leaders that the subsequent time a women is described as being aggressive to “take a deep breath” and ask specific questions.

Later she discussed a trend she has seen recently of CEOs seeking to assign more women to the board to deal with a gender imbalance, which she said could offend some women who’re invited and make some people believe women are being given an unfair advantage to fill the quota.

However, Sandberg believes in this occasion a further advantage is critical to undo all of the “systematic bias” at the “unlevel playing field”.

She said: “I believe if we had more women on the table where decisions are made, we might make better decisions. Companies with more women in senior roles make better decisions.

“Some people question me: would the sector be peaceful [if women were dependable]? I don’t know, let’s try it, it can’t get any worse.”

Although the chat failed to cover any of Sandberg’s day job at Facebook, she did say CEO Mark Zuckerberg asked her the question – which subsequently was publish to lots of the walls inside Facebook’s HQ – “what would you do in case you weren’t afraid”? This spoke of the certainty that insecurity is what holds many girls back.

She answered that she would “speak out for women” and went directly to write Lean In, which was published in March this year.

Sanberg’s comments follow a report by marketing recruitment agency EMR that men are twice as prone to reach the pinnacle marketing positions than women.  

Mars is participating within the Technology Strategy Board’s IC Tomorrow competition, which attempts to pair-up large organisations and begin-up firms, with as much as £100,000 of presidency-funding on offer.

Each of the participating contest partners, which also includes the IAB, UK charity Nesta and media agency Vizeum, will partner with the eventual winning start-ups, offering them a 3-month trial in their ideas.

The confectionary manufacturer, alongside it media agency MediaCom, will field pitches on how brands in its sector can better measure the impact of mobile advertising on sales figures, so it will probably channel advertising budgets more effectively.

Stefan Bardega, MediaCom’s managing partner and head of digital, says tracking the effectiveness of a digital campaign is increasingly hard to implement, especially as consumer purchase journeys occur across devices.

He adds: “Start-up firms are flexible, agile and collaborative inside the way they work, and offer yet another perspective on solving a longtime challenge. What’s more they’ll even have the chance to check their product on one of many biggest brands on earth.”

Similarly, Nesta is participating to locate “hyperlocal advertising” technologies which might be offered to local media owners struggling to transition to the digital media landscape.

Also participating inside the Technology Strategy Board contest is the web Advertising Bureau (IAB), which has asked participants to give new social media analysis tools to its Social Media Council – a body with representatives from Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Kristin Brewe, IAB director of selling and communications, says its members are increasingly seeking to build relationships with the tech community.

Meanwhile, Aegis’ Vizeum, an agency that works with brands including BMW, Burberry and Ikea, is likewise participating within the IC Tomorrow event to look for the way to exploit digital channels to enhance engagement with TV audiences.

The event is held in association with the IPA and deadlines for entry close on 6 January, 2014.  

Speaking to Marketing Week at Dreamforce in San Francisco, the club’s online marketing director David Ball said experiments to sell tickets direct on Facebook and Twitter haven’t ended in success, which he puts right down to consumers not being inside the right mindset for ecommerce on those platforms.

He said: “Whenever we push ecommerce directly to our [social media] fans it doesn’t resonate. This can change over time the image of with email marketing when initially people failed to trust the [the platform] to buy from.

“But we discover email is the correct marketing platform for direct marketing, we see great conversion because individuals are used to it. They will delete it in the event that they aren’t interested but when they’re they know they are able to get a coupon to a game of their city because they’ve registered with us.”

Instead, the club has learned from these experiments and plans to make use of social to construct out its CRM database to help its email campaigns.

He said: “This year i need to get to grasp our customer better and segment and target the best messages at them, whether it’s a chit, tickets or our summer schools. Our email subscribers tend to be our ticket purchasers – parents and grandparents – and social has a far younger demographic.”

Harlem Globetrotters is to start experimenting with using Facebook’s recently launched Custom Audiences tool and the Salesforce platform to supplement the info it holds about its customers. 

Ball said: “I think Facebook Custom Audiences is super cool, especially because we’re only in a city per annum or a world once every three years, so It’s important for us to remain in touch up to we will and feature a true relationship with those fans to get them interested by the following time we come by their city.”