Category — News

Absolute Radio, Spotify, Visit England and kgb deals announced as launch partners, with more to follow.

On Monday, 28 March 2011, swiftcover.com launched its new six-figure social media campaign called ‘Roadology’, which aims to make everyday car journeys more exciting.

To mark its arrival, swiftcover.com is offering an all expenses paid, once in a life-time road trip for two along Route 66 for a lucky Absolute Radio listener who will bring the journey to life through the Roadology Facebook Blog. Content will also be supplied by Visit England, Spotify and kgb deals alongside many other hand-picked activities.

Using Facebook as the campaign hub and complemented with Google API map functionality, Twitter and specifically selected blogs, the Roadology Map is about enhancing road trips for UK motorists by suggesting exciting activities and interesting things to see whilst driving. On inputting a start and end point, the function will develop a route before plotting appropriate hidden gems and places of interest, tailored to individuals’ preferences.

Developed by swiftcover.com’s PR agency, Brazil, and its digital agency Steak, the insurer hopes to make journeys more interesting and fun for families, couples or individuals looking for new and different things to do and see along their potentially mundane journey.

Tina Shortle, marketing director at swiftcover.com commented: “We’re always looking to innovate and develop our offering not only for existing customers but for the wider motoring community. The Roadology campaign is extremely exciting for us and is further evidence of us pushing boundaries where we can by giving something useful back to disillusioned commuters who are looking for interesting things to do on boring car journeys.”

swiftcover.com’s PR agency, Brazil, and its digital agency Steak created Roadology and will manage the content and future development of the campaign. Both parties have set up a number of partnerships which will offer a wide range of content and functionality to further enhance the page over the coming months. 

Richard Watts, creative director at PR agency, Brazil commented: “We’ve been working with swiftcover.com for a number of years and it continues to be an exciting and innovative company. Third party relationships will enhance this offering making it a truly unique and engaging place to visit.”

Absolute Radio has partnered with the Roadology campaign to bring the Route 66 competition prize to life, driving traffic and entrants through the Facebook page. The lucky winner of this once in a life-time prize will generate content while on the trip by visiting exciting places along the route – reporting back regularly through the Roadology blog tab.

Kate Bath, head of digital display, at digital agency Steak, commented: “We have evolved swiftcover.com’s social strategy into a focused campaign that combines their core product with their target audience’s key passion points – that being travelling, journeys, music and recommendations. We believe this is a hub where consumers can go to experience new and exciting activities on the road. Coupled with this, is some great innovation in terms of technical builds and partner integration which has provided us with a solid platform on which to launch Roadology.”

swiftcover.com and Spotify have developed a bespoke Roadology Playlist  generator so that motorists can listen to their favourite songs and discover new tracks whilst they travel. Visitors to the Facebook page can enter an artist’s name to create a Spotify playlist of similar music that will last the expected time of the journey. Users with Spotify Premium can listen to the playlist through the Spotify app as they travel. Swiftcover.com is also giving ten lucky winners Spotify Premium accounts.

Regular competitions will also take shape on the page with £2,000 up for grabs in the first four weeks. Entrants need to simply upload their favourite picture of a special place in Great Britain to the competition page to stand a chance of winning.

Visit the Facebook page at www.facebook.com/roadology

The Steak Group has been appointed to handle a range of digital marketing for Adecco Group UK & Ireland, part of the world’s leading provider of HR services. The account, won at pitch, will see Minute Steak manage paid and natural search marketing and social media reputation monitoring for eight Adecco brands, including brands Office Angels, Badenoch & Clark and Spring Personnel, helping the Group maximise its online presence. Minute Steak will also manage digital promotion of Adecco’s involvement in the London Olympics 2012*. Sister digital agency Steak will handle affiliate marketing and creative build. 

Adecco, has also created a job board dedicated to meeting the human resourcing requirements of the London and UK employers in the lead up to and during the Olympic Games in 2012, Jobs for The Games.  Minute Steak’s activity will be focused on raising exposure and awareness of the job board www.jobsforthegames.co.uk launched earlier this year, through targeted search activity.

Gemma Haggarty, Managing Director of Minute Steak says, “This is an exciting brief, given that the whole country is directing its attention to the London Olympics – there is a great opportunity for people to get directly involved with the Games in London in 2012.  We are looking forward to implementing strategies to increase the awareness of Adecco Group in creative and unique ways.”

Andy Powell, Group Brand & Marketing Director, Adecco Group UK & Ireland adds, “We felt that Minute Steak understood our objectives and their insightful approach and understanding of the different customer profiles of each of our brands will help us to effectively increase our reach.”

*In January 2009, the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games (LOCOG) named Adecco as its exclusive, official recruitment services provider.

Press coverage:

Brand Republic

Media Week

Campaign

Some great news here at Steak to kick off the new year, we’re delighted to have been short-listed for an Econsultancy Innovation award. The nomination is for our work with Swiftcover in the Social Media Innovation category.

For more info and to take a look at all the categories, you can find the Econsultancy article here:

http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/7023-announcing-the-econsultancy-innovation-awards-2010-shortlist

By Gareth Owen, Search Engine Watch, Dec 15 2011

It’s that time of year again. SEO bloggers are either looking back at their predictions for 2010 and seeing how right (or wrong) they were, or making entirely new predictions for 2011 — possibly because they were so wrong last year that it wasn’t worth looking back?

I want to focus on just one prediction for 2011 and then go ahead and try to make it happen on behalf of my clients. This seems like a more simple task than coming up with five or 10 predictions, knowing that some of them were made up simply so that I could fill a blog post.

The big news in SEO recently was the revelation that social media signals affect natural search rankings, from interviews with people at both Google and Bing — although no indication was given to how much they affect rankings.

To be fair, if you were a search engine and wanted to know what brands, websites, and general content people wanted to interact with online, where would you go first? It has an added benefit for those who think that the SERPs are a bit spammy (I’m not one of them, for the record).

One way of reducing the number of arguably lower quality websites would be to look at who the popular brands are in the social media space and try to reward them with more authority.

How can SEOs take advantage of what seems to be a clear shift toward sentiment as an extra factor in achieving better rankings?

A growing number of SEO techniques can be undertaken with SEO, and specifically link building, in mind — from PR and advertorials to advertising on relevant industry websites.

In 2011, I expect this to become more closely tied with clients’ overall marketing campaigns. The best way to explain this is with an example:

Client A is a retailer, looking to boost sales of a specific range of camping equipment products. Special offers, promotions, and TV advertising is all planned and will revolve around a creative execution involving a character who will appear in their ads.

The opportunities for SEO here are endless, and need to be part of the initial planning, not an afterthought. For example:

•TV ads to be backed up with a strong PR campaign, aimed at increasing the number of brand and URL links to the client’s site.
•The specialist nature of the goods is such that a blogger outreach campaign can be undertaken, looking for product reviews, advertising opportunities, contextual links, or at least deep links from these relevant sites.
•The ad campaign’s character will have a Facebook and Twitter presence. If it is an engaging campaign, they will get a lot of followers and their profile will have strong social signals, which can then add value when linking back to the site.
•Key influencers for this market on Twitter and Facebook can be contacted and encouraged to review products, follow the main character and will retweet, “Like,” and re-post special offers or product insights.
•A campaign to win a free camping stove can be run as an “online game” (like the “throw the penguin” game, for example) and embedded on blogger sites to increase usage. It can also contain backlinks.
This gives us a “natural” balance between followed and no-followed links, contextual versus brand and URL links, from a variety of highly relevant sources, and also leverages the social media “buzz” metrics as further opportunities.

The point is that SEO, rather than being purely an ongoing process of optimization, will be more influential as part of a campaign-led marketing strategy. In 2011, we’ll need to work with our clients to ensure this happens.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

We are delighted to have been appointed by online print business MOO.COM to handle its international digital marketing activity.  The account, which was won in a three-way agency pitch, will focus on paid search and digital display advertising, and we will be responsible for driving sales and acquiring new customers across UK, USA, Australia and other English speaking territories.  We will utilise teams in our London, New York and Melbourne offices to manage the MOO account.

Our task is to help raise awareness of the MOO brand and its range of innovative personalised print products and accessories through targeted display campaigns and to drive a high volume of quality traffic to MOO through paid search.

Paul Lewis, Head of Marketing at MOO comments, “We’re excited to be working with Steak; we feel that their energy and passion, as well as their understanding of driving efficient results, is a great fit with MOO as we look to accelerate global growth”.

Phil Burgess, Client Service Director at Steak adds, “MOO is one of those brands that you can’t help falling in love with a little bit, because it mixes traditional skills such as print and makes it personal and accessible to everyone via the web. We’re looking forward to working with them across multiple territories and utilising the Steak network to deliver sales”.

MOO, founded in 2004, combines the values of professional design with the accessibility and reach of the Internet.  With the patent-pending ‘Printfinity’ technology, MOO helps its customers to showcase their business or brand, their products or personality, by printing a different image on every card in a pack.  MOO has raised over US $5M in venture capital from the Accelerator Group, Index Ventures and Atlas Venture – the investors behind Skype, Betfair, Lovefilm, Last.fm and MySQL.  MOO’s customer base extends to 180 countries, and has a 75% NetPromoter rating.

Press Coverage:

Campaign

Brand Republic

Media Week

Marketing Magazine

By Duncan Parry, Search Engine Watch,  Nov 19, 2010

The search industry never stops. From AltaVista to Google, and GoToast to Search Ignite, the fortunes of companies and technologies evolve over time.

I was reminded of this recently when training new hires. They’d never head of names like AltaVista, Excite, Lycos, etc. — companies that defined the search space less than 10 years ago.

So, how do you keep up to date?

Ignore the Noise

It’s important to recognize that there are many, many blogs and articles published about search every day — and many more “experts” on forums and Twitter and in Facebook and LinkedIn groups.

You can ignore most of them. The ability of the search industry to report on, discuss, analyze, argue about, and regurgitate a fact until it has been distorted out of all proportion and attained myth-like status is legendary. There’s a lot of noise — so you need to spend your limited time on sites that are credible and, most importantly, correct.

It’s also important to note that the search engines are no longer search companies — they offer much broader product lines; so you will need to keep up to date on developments in all their products, too, as search is often integrated into them (and paid search revenues pay for them).

Select an RSS Reader

I can’t think of an industry news site that doesn’t have an RSS feed — so choosing a good reader is crucial. There are many available. I use Google Reader to collate and organize feeds by topic in folders as it’s tied to my Google login and easy to use on any computer, iPad, or mobile.

I often use Feedly linked to Google Reader as it offers a slicker interface that feels closer to a magazine. Another bonus of Google Reader is that you can add any URL to it — not just RSS feeds — and Reader will monitor the page for changes and present them as if a feed has updated.

Many sites offer several feeds — follow those most relevant to your area of work and interests; it’s easy to overload yourself with feeds and find you have more than 100 articles to wade through every morning. Pretty soon you’ll find you’re too busy to bother, and end up reading nothing.

Keep an Eye on the Mainstream Press

Sometimes announcements by the search engines receive mainstream coverage — or a story breaks about a negative issue, like the recent Google Street View privacy coverage. Add the technology sections of mainstream sites like the New York Times, USA Today, BBC News, etc., to your reader to ensure you know the stories your clients (and their bosses) are reading over their breakfast.

Digital Overall

To keep any eye on the wider industry I follow a few key sites — Mashable, The Next Web, Robert Scoble, John Battelle’s Search Blog, and Econsultancy, to name a few.

The Search Stalwarts

There are a few search-focused sites that are must-reads. Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Land are the two heavyweights; I receive their newsletters every morning as well as follow their feeds; they provide a summary of the most important search news and topics. Search Engine Roundtable is also important and often have details of new Google tests or rumors with some basis to them as reported on other sites or forums.

There are of course many other digital industry and search sites — the above sites link to good sources as they cover stories, helping you find other sources.

Don’t Forget To Cull

One last piece of advice: don’t forget to delete feeds. Over time, sites change editor, or their focus shifts or their writing declines in quality. So when a site seems to publish nothing of interest, delete it — your time is precious.

We are very excited to announce that Steak won the sought after DADi award for ‘Best Digital Media Strategy’ for our work with Swiftcover.com and the ‘Summers’s Hottest Playlist’. Steak, also received a commendation for ‘Best Use of Organic Search’ for  Virgin Holidays.

The ‘Summer’s Hottest Playlist’ campaign harnessed the passion of Swiftcover’s music-loving audience and sought to engage with its fans through a fun online campaign.

Car insurance isn’t something that usually sparks much excitement but with Swiftcover we tapped into the music festival spirit with a Facebook app and interactive challenge to social media fans to devise the “Summer’s Hottest Playlist”. The campaign worked in collaboration with top Absolute Radio DJs and Spotify.  Facebook fans increased by 280% in a two-week period, and 22,000 people voted for the playlist.

We were also very pleased to receive recognition of our work with Virgin Holidays’ January Sale in SEO, where we beat our sales target by 168%!
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So it’s smiles all round.

John Barton, Head of Social Media and Lynsey Galashan, Senior Accout Executive, receiving the award for ‘Best Digital Strategy’ on Friday night.

Halloween proved to be a suitably chilling affair over here at Steak HQ featuring a pumpkin carving competition, competitive mummy-making, apple bobbing, a costume competition and some seriously scary dancing. As you can see below everyone made a massive effort, so good in fact the votes for best costume were tied, resulting in a thrilling dance off to decide the eventual winner. Even Penny the Cow joined in the fun…

Look out for Steak CEO, Oliver Bishop as Count Duckula!

Steak Social Committee

Ex- Head of Account Management UK and Ireland at Yahoo moves to Australia to head up Steak

LONDON 21 October 2010 – Steak, the digital marketing services agency, announces the appointment of Nick Gill as Managing Director of Steak Australia. Based in Melbourne, Gill will head up the full service digital agency team offering SEM, SEO and integrated digital media for their client base including Red Group Retail (Borders, Angus & Robertson, Whitcoulls), Big W, Best Western, Betfair and Thrifty. Nick will replace Martin Carlill who has worked for Steak Group (UK and Australia) for just over five years.

Nick joins from Yahoo! UK & Ireland, where he was Head of Account Management, responsible for a team of over 60, providing integrated display, search, mobile and video marketing solutions to Yahoo!’s largest advertisers, generating revenue in excess of £50 million a year.  Previously, Nick was appointed by Yahoo! Search Marketing in 2006 to lead the sales and account management team for the launch of Yahoo!’s global search advertising platform.

Born in Melbourne, Nick moved to the UK in 2001 and began his online career at QXL.com, after which, he joined Kelkoo, Europe’s leading online price comparison site, in 2003.  Kelkoo was acquired by Yahoo! For €540 million, by which time Nick had been promoted to head of Sales leading a team responsible for the management of some of the UK’s largest businesses including retailing  juggernauts Curry’s, Comet and John Lewis.

Oliver Bishop, co-founder and CEO of Steak comments, “I would like to thank Martin wholeheartedly for his dedication in running the Steak office, building our proposition in Melbourne, and his work with us in the UK.  We sincerely wish him all the best in his next venture.  We would also like to welcome Nick to Steak, he has the wealth of knowledge and experience in the digital sector which will take Steak Australia to the next stage.  We are excited that he’s joined us.”

Nick Gill, Managing Director of Steak Australia adds, “I have been fortunate to work in the UK at time when the industry was experiencing extraordinary growth and creativity, I’ve been waiting for the right opportunity to return to Australia, and I’m delighted I can do this through the Steak brand; and I look forward to developing the business further.”

Recent account wins for Steak in London includes comparethemarket.com and DSGi the specialist retailing group for Currys, Dixons.co.uk and PC World.

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.