Terri Tinella, marketing director of Nestlé’s confectionery division, is to leave her role and return to Canada.

Tinella has spent around 18 months in the role and is now moving internally to take up the position of managing director for confectionery at Nestlé Canada.

Nestlé declined to comment on whether Tinella would be replaced. But one source suggested that Tinella’s departure is unlikely to prompt a widespread review of its marketing operations.

Tinella was appointed to the role at the start of 2009 and oversaw brands including Kit Kat and its Rowntree and Milky Bar ranges.

Her departure does not impact on the role of Vernon Bradley, who was appointed earlier this year to the new position of group marketing director for the UK and Ireland, as it looked to up the ante against rival Kraft.

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The global technology firm, Hewlett-Packard, will be creating hundreds of new jobs, including marketing positions, at its base in Renfrewshire, Scotland.

HP is set to increase its workforce by 700 through the creation of an IT service hub in Erskine. This will create a mixture of roles, including new marketing jobs, and will receive up to £7 million of Regional Selective Assistance (RSA) support from Scottish Enterprise – establishing Erskine as a central core for developing and delivering IT services to the UK.

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MBNA has confirmed to that the firm’s marketing department will be imminently restructured as part of a wider review.

This will result in ‘a reduction of 75 positions’ in the division, although 46 new marketing jobs will become available as part of the new look marketing department.

The Bank of America-owned operator, which recently announced the sponsorship of Chester FC, is one of the region’s largest employers, with around 4,000 employees at its North West base.

A spokesperson released a statement, which reads:

“We are no different to any other major employer in that we regularly review our business structures to make sure they are right for our customers and our business priorities.

“Following a detailed review of our operations, we announced to Associates some time ago that we could see a reduction of around 85 positions in our Credit and Customer Assistance divisions and we have been in ongoing consultation with those Associates potentially impacted.

“On Monday we announced that we may see the reduction of a further 75 positions in our Marketing Division and we have initiated consultation with these Associates.

“We will, however, be creating 46 new jobs as part of a restructured Marketing division, and will welcome applications from those associates who may be impacted by these changes.”

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Former Labour Party advisers are being passed over for senior roles in PR consultancies because of ‘unrealistic’ salary demands.

Scores of Labour advisers have entered the jobs market following the party’s general election defeat on 6 May, but only a handful of unemployed Labour aides have secured roles in lobbying and PR.

Agency bosses have revealed that most ex-Labour aides were demanding more than £80,000 per annum – with some expecting to be paid as much as £100,000.

A senior figure at one of the UK’s biggest PR consultancies said: ‘You pay that for a director, but there’s not a hope in hell that some of these people will earn that.

‘They are adding these sums on to what they were paid in government, but it’s completely unrealistic. They need to get in the real world.’

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James Soames has left The Number 118 118 after a year with the company as its marketing director, in order to set up his own consultancy.

The marketing director’s departure comes just three months after CEO Gerry Murphy, formerly Superdrug’s top marketer, left the company.

Together at 118 118, they oversaw a repositioning of the brand, which included launching an SMS information service which claimed to answer any question. Sports scores and weather updates were later integrated into its SMS offerings.

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Profit margins and productivity have fallen across most types of marketing sectors, as the recession takes its toll on company accounts, according to a new survey.

However, productivity levels remain healthy, says the Kingston Smith survey.

Media buyers and public relations firms have weathered the recession relatively well, with operating profit margins of 18.6% and 15.2% respectively, an analysis of more than 200 company accounts by accounting firm Kingston Smith also found.

“Public relations agencies spent 59.3% of income on staff they
still managed to achieve margins of 15.2% due to tighter overhead cost control than some other disciplines,” Kingston Smith says.

Digital marketing continues its strong growth (11.7%), although Kingston Smith notes that many digital agencies are still unable to make decent profit margins despite the ubiquity of online marketing.

Across marketing, productivity fell by 1%, compared to December 2009, with gross income per head £106,000, exceeding Kingston Smith’s recommended target of £100,000.

But it’s not all gloom within the agency world. Despite the recession agencies appear bullish that market conditions will improve, the survey adds.

“Most agencies have felt the effects of the prolonged economic downturn with many suffering a fall in gross income,” it says. “There hasn’t been a corresponding decrease in staff numbers as agencies are either being bullish about a return to better conditions or are standing by loyal staff members.”

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The fees for the revamps, which come on top of salaries and other external costs, were criticised by campaigners who say the money would be better used ensuring residents have workable access to the internet.

One council refreshed the look of its website eight times in a decade, another paid more than a thousand pounds for a spellchecker that comes free with word processing software.

The wide differences between town hall website budgets – which were revealed in Freedom of Information requests by the Telegraph – suggest that some are paying well over the odds.

A redesign and revamp of the technology underlying a council website, for instance, costs half of the councils which replied less than £15,000, but the Telegraph uncovered 10 examples of councils paying between £100,000 and £600,000.

These examples are in addition to Birmingham City Council’s admission last year that it had spent £2.8 million on a redesign of its website. Essex County Council told the BBC last month that it had spent £800,000 on a new website.

The spending is controversial because many people, particularly in rural areas, struggle to get online. Research suggests up to one third of the country does not receive a basic level of broadband.

“It would be sensible for the councils to plough the money into helping to improve the broadband infrastructure first before designing their fancy websites,” said Henry Robinson, vice president of The Country Land & Business Association (CLA).”Broadband access for rural areas in particular is essential for the thousands of businesses based in the countryside which are at an unfair disadvantage to their urban competitors”, he said.

Some councils are pushing ahead with redesigns of their web sites even as they lay off staff.

Medway Council, which has a £6 million budget shortfall threatening up to 50 jobs, has assigned £250,000 for a redesign of its website which was last updated in 2003.

The 2003 redesign cost £600,000, despite being criticised at a council meeting last year for having “limited interactive functionality and an unsupported technical infrastructure”. Simon Wakeman, Head of Communications and Marketing at Medway told the Telegraph: “The major developments in internet technology in the past seven years mean the website no longer fully meets the needs and expectations of our customers”.

Medway announced in June that budget shortfalls would mean cuts of half a million from before and after-school activities, more than £800,000 from Medway’s primary and secondary schools and £100,000 from public health spending.

Another council spending money on its website under looming budget cuts is Northamptonshire Council. Northamptonshire cut 15 jobs in February last year, saving £1.4 million. That same month it finished a £450,000 revamp of its external and internal website structure, including a new intranet for staff. A spokesperson for Northamptonshire, said: “The £450,000 related to the costs of building three new websites from scratch: internet, intranet and community portal. [It also] relates to the costs of designing the sites, the content management system, accessibility testing, training, and migrating content from our old website to the new one”.

Northamptonshire’s public traffic figures show that the County’s website is serving a very small proportion of the community. Assuming all of the site’s 80,000 monthly visitors are Northamptonshire residents, only 11 per cent of the county accesses the website in an average month.

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The number of visitors to Times Online has almost halved since the introduction of the paywall, according to ComScore’s latest figures for newspaper traffic during July.

Times Online, which introduced its paywall on 2 July, saw its number of unique visitors drop from 2.79m in May to 2.22m in June, and then to 1.61m in July.

The traffic figures bode better than the predictions of some industry observers – that the paper would lose more than 90% of its online readership.

Engagement metrics, however, including dwell time and total number of pages viewed have also decreased, despite the assumption that subscribers would be “more committed to and engaged with” the title.

News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks told News International staff in May that she excepted the number of unique users of the site come down dramatically, but that those who registered would be customers who had made a positive decision to pay a fair price for journalism that they valued, and they would be more committed to and engaged.

Visitors to Times Online have spent less time since May, with dwell time decreasing from 7.6 minutes in May to 5.8 minutes in June, before dropping to 4 minutes in July.

Total page views decreased from 29m in May to 20m in June and fell to 9m in July.

This compares with Mail Online, which attracted 8.997m total unique visitors for July, 215m total pages viewed and an average of 25 minutes spent on the site per user.

Despite the drop, Times Online is above Metro.co.uk, which now ranks bottom of the online papers, with 1.466m total unique visitors, a total of 11m pages viewed, and a dwell time of 5 minutes.

Times Online’s offer of subscribing for £1 for the first month may have helped stem the migration of online readers to other titles. The next challenge will be to attract a loyal subscriber base that is willing to pay full price.

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Marketing agencies are feeling more optimistic than ever, with 87% feeling positively about client budget increases, new business opportunities and staff numbers  for the last quarter of 2010.

Some 87% of respondents to a Marketing Agencies Association Agency Barometer survey predict client budgets will either stay the same or increase.

Out of those predicting an increase in client spend, 83% expect the increase to be over 10%. 75% of agencies are also expecting the number of new business opportunities to increase before the end of the year, with only 3% predicting decreases in this area.

The disciplines predicted to do the best in Q3 are digital and experiential; with 60% and 35% agencies respectively predicting an increase in spend on these channels over the next quarter.

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The International Marketing Festival in Edinburgh is set to launch over the 23rd and 24th August, featuring speakers from brands such as Sony Music, LoveFilm and Google.

The Marketing Society, creativebrief and The Assembly will host a series of events and talks to discuss the future of marketing.

Roisin Donnelly, corporate marketing director for UK and Ireland at Procter & Gamble, will host The Marketing Society’s events.

Speakers from brands like Sony Music, Bacardi and Fosters, plus agencies like BBH, VCCP and Octagon, will present their thoughts on how marketing influences society.

Key topics include branded content and entertainment, what ‘digital’ means for the decade ahead, and the future for advertising.

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