Posts from — September 2010

Google recently announced that AdWords Product Extensions would be available to all UK advertisers, after what feels like a very long period of beta testing with select merchants.

They look like this, for anybody unfamiliar with them:

Adwords Product Extensions Results for Mountain Bikes

Product extensions provide consumers with additional (mainly visual) information about products, and provide advertisers with more of a showcase for their wares. I have to admit I’ve yet to click through because of them – a situation that will no doubt change as coverage rises.

I can see them working especially well for advertisers offering products in the same category that appeal to different tastes but that attract the same keywords – e.g. different types of chair (antique carved wood to minimalist metal) listed in a Product Box triggered by “dining chairs”.

However, my betting is many retailers are unable to quickly adopt Product Extensions – because of their own website technology. I never cease to be amazed by the number of brands who have a good website and little or no capability to regularly create, manipulate, update and publish feeds from it; meaning they can’t utilise Google Merchant Centre to boost their product coverage in Google. There are lots of brands out there whom think they have feeds and are fine; in fact their feeds are often lacking photos, basic information (i.e. data attributes) and generally are a dog’s dinner.

Of course here at Steak we have tried and tested ways around these problems using our own capabilities or those of selected 3rd party providers, but the fact remains: brands would save themselves time, money and missed sales if they paid feeds a little more attention; something underscored by some of the points made in Gareth and I’s Splinternet essay and talks. Feeds are going to be more important in future – not less; Product Extensions are just one immediate example of that.

Working as part of the creative team we are constantly reading blogs and searching the web for cool and inspiring things. Whether they be animations, videos, websites, apps or just pictures.

I came across the following video made by Dentsu London and was instantly drawn to it! They have used the iPad along with 3D animation software and long exposure photos to create this amazing stop frame animation!

Dentsu have also gathered a collection of images from the film into a book which shows even as static images they are still quite powerful and inspiring.

Making Future Magic: iPad light painting from Dentsu London on Vimeo.

In the last few months the affiliate industry has been embroiled in the debate of whether we’ve become dependent upon “cashback” and “aggregator” sites, rendering the production of old school ‘real’ content  dead and just not worth it any more.

Although cashback and incentives sites can provide the merchant with desired visitor volume, and there is no doubt that they have given the affiliate space an important boost, they should not be solely relied up by affiliate managers and networks to deliver a well-rounded affiliate campaign.

In a similar manner to the way in which  ‘brand’ and ‘generic’ terms are split in PPC reports,  we anticipate that merchants will start to request the splite between ‘cashback’ and ‘content” on affiliate reports, potentially exposing the reliability on incentive site to sustain the volume of sales.

We know that content sites cannot reach the same volumes as the aggregators or cashback sites, but we can work with them to help them deliver better figures. We must also educate the affiliate that content will not only help their search ranking and that other tools such as video content can provide that much needed traffic. Reviews, critiques, articles, opinions, comparison tables, blogs and so on all add up to create content that makes the affiliate stronger.

It is important, however, not only to encourage the affiliate to push advertiser engagement, but to also educate the advertiser that content in any form is extremely useful, and that it should be constant and fluid.

As affiliate managers we should also be working closely with the SEO teams to cross reference contacts through a hybrid of affiliate activity and SEO value contributors.

Cashback and voucher sites have become a big part of the affiliate industry; nevertheless 2011 should be the year of re nurturing the content affiliate and increase results across the board.

Jorge Anastasiu

Steak Affiliate Executive

comparethemarket.com, the insurance price comparison website, has appointed Steak to handle its natural search account with immediate effect, following a three-way pitch.  The incumbent agency was Tamar.

Mark Attwell, Associate Director, eCommerce of comparethemarket.com says, “We work with specialists in different areas of our business, and were attracted to Steak’s transparent approach and proven track record in delivering results quickly.”

Ollie Bishop, CEO and co-founder of Steak adds, “We’re excited to be working with comparethemarket.com, an iconic brand with great recognition through their comparethemeerkat.com marketing campaign.  With high awareness in this marketplace already, we will be taking their brand further by optimising their site to work better within the SEO arena, ensuring a steady flow of new visitors to their website.”

comparethemarket.com was launched in 2006 as a motor insurance comparison site, offering customers a wide range of competitively priced insurance quotes instantly online, from over 400 insurance prices. It is now the most recognised insurance price comparison website in the UK.
As well as insurance, comparethemarket.com also offers comparisons on credit cards, loans, current accounts and savings accounts.

Nokia Push and Burton Snowboards have teamed up to create a pretty awesome real life gaming experience for release in 2011. Now I’m no a snowboarder, in fact I’ve never set foot on a slope never mind a snowboard, but I don’t think that matters in order to appreciate just how cool this is.

Previous projects include PUSH Skating which takes skating back onto the streets and away from the games consoles. Simply put, the push technology is an application on your phone that tracks how you skate, but this new project Push Burton really steps things up a notch or two.

You gain points based on your tricks, speed and general skill on the board, which is all synced up with your social life in real time and logged online. The opportunities for integration with social media are endless. I can’t really do it justice; you should really watch the video:

Reuters reported today that:

A French court has ordered Google Inc to pay 5,000 euros ($6,672) in libel damages to a man who claimed that searches for his name automatically yielded a list of harmful suggestions.

The man, whose name was not given, said the suggested terms that came up when typing his name on Google.fr — including the words “rape,” “rapist” and “prison” — were damaging for his reputation, court documents showed.

The man had previously been condemned to a prison sentence on charges of corrupting a minor, the documents showed.

Source: Reuters France via Yahoo

This ruling highlights for me one of the fundamental challenges that Google – and by extension any provider of technology which disseminates information – will face over the coming years.

Traditionally, laws have largely existed to protect from slander, libel, defamation or whatever the legal term is in the jurisdiction in question. Whilst the legal differences between countries are themselves a topic of debate, a fundamental fact is present in the vast majority of cases: somebody, somewhere somebody took a conscious decision to publish/broadcast/speak and that in turn led to legal action.

Google, however, did not take any human decision. Technology reacted to an event that is a matter of court record – a man was convicted of a serious crime against a no doubt vulnerable minor – and Google’s technology detected a trend of search strings including the man’s name and various terms about the court case. The technology then provided these as search suggestions. No human was involved at Google.

The challenge for Google here has several aspects. On the surface, the law is telling technology companies they must filter out search suggestions (or taken by extension, any function that connects an entity to events or facts) or face a court case; a difficult task, and success will never be 100%. Human filtering is a ridiculous idea given the global volumes and constant change involved.

The reality is that Google and the sector’s challenge is much larger. This case aside – which Google is appealing – the laws, education systems, public knowledge and indeed concpets of privacy in connected societies across the world are simply outdated or too low. Governments and organisations remain as slow as ever to learn, change laws and policies and adapt to the reality of an always-on, digitally connected century. Google and other companies are engaged in a long-term struggle to lobby and help bureaucracy itself grow up into the digital age.

An enlightened court in my opinion would be operating within a well-defined set of laws balancing privacy with the public’s need, and indeed right, to know about crimes carried out in their society – after conviction of course; rumours and lies should be hunted down and met with legal action. Just as a newspaper, TV station, blog post or Reuters article can connected the criminals name with details of his crime, so Google should be able to in their search suggestions -  after all, they already do so in their search results.

Swiftcover.com, the pioneer in online insurance, launches a fun campaign to celebrate the end of the summer.  Using social media and supporting display campaign, swiftcover.com calls on users to upload their favourite photos to its Facebook app from 27 September-10 October.  The photos aren’t the usual shots of people partying: the call is for the saddest faces to “mourn the passing of the British summer”.  Users will also be able to download a playlist of the best of the summer festival music.

The gallery of sad faces will feature on the swiftcover.com Facebook page, updated in real-time, and can be linked to users’ own Facebook pages.  The winner of the best “mourning” face will be announced w/c 11 October, judged by swiftcover.com and will win a Red Letter DayTM experience day voucher worth £300; further prizes include 20 Spotify premium accounts worth £2,400.

The interactive campaign including display advertising, social media activity and advertising in casual games; was devised and conceived by swiftcover.com’s digital agency Steak.  Steak also designed and developed the “Summer Mourning” Facebook application. 

Visitors to the swiftcover.com Facebook page can download a best of the summer festivals top 25 tracks, voted by music fans, from a playlist devised by swiftcover.com, Absolute Radio and Steak.  The list is available for free download via Spotify from 27th September.

Tina Shortle, Marketing Director of Swiftcover says, “We’re excited that social media remains at the heart of this campaign. Last spring, our ‘favourite tracks of the summer’ playlist successfully encouraged sharing between Facebook users, and with the success of this year’s summer festivals; the Summer Mourning campaign and its best of festivals playlist is a fun way of engaging with our audience around the popular subject of the end of the British summer through posting up sad faces. We’ve been delighted to partner with Absolute Radio and Spotify to create Britain’s favourite festival music playlist and it’s been great to see Facebook users take part to vote for their favourite tracks.”
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John Barton, Head of Planning and Social Media at Steak says ” Music and summer festivals are effective passion points for the swiftcover.com demographic and form the basis of our content strategy and Spotify playlist voting campaign. Swiftcover.com is utilising social channels to interact with their audience in an accessible way. People love to share their photographs and then ‘upload a photo to enter’ format is effective for community building. However this format is nothing new. We wanted to close the summer strategy in a different, fun and memorable way by poking fun at the winter blues after an amazing summer of music festivals with swiftcover.com and Absolute radio.”

Kate Hussey, Head of Display at Steak says “We are once again excited about extending the field of our current social activity to further develop a relationship between consumer and client. We believe that integration between all digital and other advertising channels is crucial to gain stand out, but essentially, it’s finding a connection with your consumers that will gain, the all important, traction. We are delighted to partner with a client who is constantly pushing the boundaries of building consumer relationships through digital”.

Really pleased to have been included in the media agency section of NMA’s ‘Top 100 Interactive Agencies’ guide for 2010. This guide lists the top 100 digital, design & build and technical agencies on income earned, but also separately ranks media agencies by gross billings, and it’s in this section that Steak appears. For more info take a look at: http://top100.nma.co.uk/

From the NMA site – “Steak has started building capabilities in mobile and social media over the last year, appointing Mark-Antony Baker as head of mobile and John Barton as its first head of planning and social media.
According to Steak, social media has become an integral part of campaigns. Key projects in this area have included work for Swiftcover, partnering the online insurer with Absolute Radio, Spotify and Facebook to encourage its audience to vote for their favourite songs and to create the ‘summer’s hottest playlist’.”

See press clippings below:

By Gareth Owen, Search Engine Watch, Sep 22 2010

Alex Cohen yesterday wrote about how paid results are increasingly getting clicks at the expense of organic results in “PPC vs. SEO: Paid Search as Your

By Gareth Owen, Search Engine Watch, Feb 16 2011

In the last couple weeks we’ve seen the introduction of Google Instant results and subsequently a heap of excited blog posts about the impact it will have on the industry, SEO, and clients the world over. As often happens, the news became a trending topic on the media industry-heavy Twitter, and the impact of Google Instant on people who actually use Google for something other than their job was slightly lost in the noise.

Early results suggest it hasn’t actually changed anything to any large degree. Certainly my mother still doesn’t know what it is and my wife found it irritating and switched it off as soon as I showed her how. I’ll stick my neck on the line (hey, why not?) and bet that it will have disappeared by February.

While the impact of Google Instant is interesting for SEOs, there are plenty of other interesting strategies to discuss that can actually have an “instant” impact. Today.

How about a website ranking number one for [car insurance] with only four links pointing to it with “car insurance” as the anchor text? Pretty interesting, right? For such a competitive keyword you might expect somewhat more volume than this, out of a total number of inbound links less than any other site on the first page…

Last time, we discussed why you shouldn’t be afraid of URL links, and why they’re actually more likely to suggest a natural link profile. There have also been some other more detailed posts looking further into this and so it wasn’t much of a surprise seeing that a number of sites with very spammy-looking backlink profiles were penalized — it’s not like Google hasn’t been warning people about this for a while.

Right now we have instances of clients who are well-known within their markets — good websites providing useful content — but they aren’t ranking precisely because they have too many site-wide links, too many links that are dofollow, and too many contextual links (remember I said last month a good link looks like this — cheap viagra? — well forget it).

By “too many,” I mean as a percentage of overall links, all adding up to a link profile that is completely unnatural. We’re improving their positions by actively removing links, and the only links coming in are branded, URL links from highly relevant sites.

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The challenge this poses for some SEO agencies is that they have got their approach to link building so ingrained that they haven’t spotted some of these trends. Instead, they put more effort into building the wrong kind of links, making the situation worse for their clients.

This means that SEOs and agencies need to consider not just how to build quality links for clients but how to actively manage the link profile and ensure that the right links are being built.

For some, this will mean the normal contextual links, derivatives of them, and a few branded, long tail and URL links as well. For others, it will be weeding out site-wide contextual links, replacing them with higher quality branded and URL links, and even building some nofollowed links from social media and PR sites.

In short, it will pay to be able to take a step back from what you’re doing and analyze what the client needs in a bit more detail.

Alastair and Kate will be speaking at this year’s Ad:tech London, at 12.30 on the first day (Tuesday 21st) – come along and see them! 

They’re giving the following presentation:

Discover the benefits of having a digital agency as your lead agency
Are you guilty of bolting on your digital strategy as an afterthought once the big idea has been agreed? Why? Digital marketing is about to dominate offline forms of marketing and your digital agency can tell you more about your customers and their responses to your brand than traditional above the line outfits. More and more clients are asking digital agencies to take the lead and inform the strategy from the outset. Join us in this session to find out why, and how, and what the benefits of this approach can be.

More info on Ad:tech and how to attend (for free) can be found on their website: www.ad-techlondon.co.uk  

Hope to see you there…