Avengers: Endgame smashes worldwide box office record, taking $1.2bn in debut weekend April 29, 2019 The newest Marvel film has beaten box office records with a huge $1.2bn (£929m) around the world in opening ticket sales. Read more: Avengers, Assemble: the business lessons to learn from Marvel's superheroes Avengers: Endgame, which opened in the UK on Thursday, has beaten the record set by the previous film in the Marvel superhero [...]
Barclays shares: Optimists see an opportunity April 29, 2019 | City Talk By Graeme Evans from interactive investor. These results do not impress, but there’s lots going on at Barclays and plenty to interest investors. Without the attention generated by activist investor Edward Bramson, it’s likely that last week’s lacklustre investment banking performance at Barclays (LSE:BARC) may have been passed off as just another quarter blighted by [...]
Natwest online banking outage: Bank apologises as customers unable to access accounts April 29, 2019 Natwest customers have been frozen out of their accounts this morning due to an online outage. The bank confirmed on Twitter that it had been experiencing issues and has been instructing customers to delete temporary internet files and try again. Read more: TSB online banking outage hits customers The outage began at around 5am, according [...]
Economic confidence falls in Eurozone and EU as slowdown drags on April 29, 2019 Confidence in the Eurozone economy fell for the 10th consecutive month in April as managers became markedly more pessimistic about industry as the continent’s slowdown continues. April’s economic sentiment indicator, released by the European Commission, decreased by 1.6 points for the Euro area and 1.5 points in the European Union in April, compared to falls [...]
Missing the opportunity to align ourselves with the US would be a serious mistake April 29, 2019 The UK is the world’s leading exporter of financial services. Within that, there are few better success stories than the special relationship that we have built with the United States. The benefits for both sides are obvious. Every day, a million UK citizens go to work for US firms, while the same number of US [...]
The white paper’s strict salary threshold on EU migrants would only exacerbate inequality April 29, 2019 Britain is on course to leave the European Union by 31 October. However, Theresa May has expressed her wish that the UK should quit well before, provided her withdrawal agreement is passed. Nonetheless, whether we leave with a deal or without one, the government has been clear that ending free movement and bringing down immigration [...]
A pro-business mayor? Khan is less so than Livingstone April 29, 2019 Before he was elected, Sadiq Khan promised – in this newspaper and elsewhere – to be the “most pro-business mayor yet”. In a literal sense, that pledge was already a bit limited, because Khan has only had two predecessors: Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson. The first one was an apologist for assorted Communist regimes. In [...]
Atomic London wants to modernise the creative agency landscape and help solve marketing problems April 29, 2019 The big ad agencies are struggling. WPP’s challenges since Sir Martin Sorrell’s departure are well documented. Last week, it was reported that car rental company Hertz was suing its former marketing partner Accenture over a piece of shoddy web design. More broadly, brands are bringing their marketing in-house, denying revenue to agencies. For advertising executive [...]
London gym chain Frame talks fitness, health, wellbeing, and babies April 29, 2019 Fitness is big business. There are over 7,000 gyms in the UK, and the market is worth almost £5bn, with around one in seven people paying gym membership fees. The sector has swelled thanks to the health and wellbeing trend which has grown in importance over the last decade, but also because of the huge [...]
Gillette proves that cultural relevance is key to a brand’s future performance April 29, 2019 In an age of so much cultural change, it’s vital that brands regularly take stock of their “relevance” in current society. For a 117-year old brand like Gillette, exploring what masculinity actually means in this day and age was essential for its continued existence. Gillette is a brand that used to be only about the [...]