Using our skill-set to help the National Literacy Trust

This is a bit of a departure from my usual blogs, which focus solely on the industry and DVO’s perception of the challenges that brands face. But, this time around I wanted to take a look at a piece of work we were involved in through 2014 with The National Literacy Trust (NLT), an amazing charity which works tirelessly helping to raise literacy standards in the UK.

As an agency that values content so highly, including the editorial variety, it seemed like an obvious fit to offer our services for the Books About Town campaign. It involved digital, installations, and a good deal of participation from famous authors and artists to create book benches, which you may well have seen dotted around London as part of four trails. On Tuesday, with summer and prime outdoor reading weather having drawn to a close, the benches were auctioned off. In total, over £250,000 was raised for the charity, funds that are vital for the NLT to be able to continue its good work in the UK.Continue reading

Why artificially building links is a tired and risky strategy

In my latest post I’m looking at link building and why building links artificially is a risky and short sighted strategy.

I’ve written a number of posts hoping to demystify content marketing and hopefully highlight what brands should look for in a content marketing agency, writes Ben Dickens, content marketing agency DVO’s managing director. But I thought it would be valuable to take a good hard look at the notion of link building and why both brands and agencies seem to equate content marketing with link building.Continue reading

Webspace – A new paradigm in online marketing

Successful online marketing is about building a great website, then promoting it through advertising, optimising it for organic traffic and getting some journalists to write about you, right?

Nope. That’s more like what you do if you have an offline shop.

Online marketing is about optimising multiple properties to function as an interrelated digital ecosystem. I call that a webspace.

Up until fairly recently, online strategy has been dictated by the ‘rules’ of marketing of an offline, pre-internet world. But, due to more digitally savvy marketers gaining senior positions and the sheer volume of data available today to measure success, this is changing.Continue reading