Archive for February, 2009

Lastminute.com just sent me an email. They’ve invited me to tune into their latest advertising campaign this weekend.

For those of you that haven’t seen the email, I’ll let lastminute explain the concept…

“On Saturday 28 February at 9.50pm, watch us (lastminute.com) on telly and win a big bundle of good stuff.

We’re creating a television first – and we want you to be part of it. Tune into ITV on Saturday 28 February at 9.50pm. Three 60 second adverts will be aired, straight after each other, starting on ITV, moving to Channel 4 and then ending on Channel 5.

It’s going to be the world’s first Mexican wave of thumbs up”

I love the idea, A novel and interesting approach and perfect for the target audience. Something fun and easy to engage with, but I can’t help feeling like they’ve got their choice of launch day a little, well, wrong.

I see their target audience, as (after a quick straw poll) most people do. As 20-35 somethings with reasonable levels of disposable income and an appetite for travel. The type of audience that are out on a Saturday night, in restaurants, bars, pubs and clubs. The type of audience that won’t see this advert this coming Saturday.

Of course lastminute.com have access to reams of consumer data, and have fantastic insight on their typical consumer profile, but I can’t help thinking that the advert break at 1:30pm between Hollyoaks, the Eastenders omnibus, and re-runs of Friends on ‘lazy’ sunday might just be more appropriate.

Maybe this is a clever ploy to capture the attention of a whole new audience? Which begs the question, how have lastmintue reached them to let them know about the 3 adverts, 3 channels idea?

O.k so the title is a little misleading. This isn’t a blog post about the new Ozzie Osbourne, no popstar has eaten any furry animals of any description and I promise no animals were harmed in the making of this blog post.

The reason for the ambiguous title is to demonstrate the power of blogs when it comes to search engine rankings.

After my latest blog post “Let’s talk about Fridges”, (didn’t see it? It’s a must read). I noticed that Google had indexed the post in less than an hour and it was proudly sitting at position number 1 in the Google rankings. I hasten to add that I wasn’t vainly searching for my own blog post, a colleague had pointed this out to me, honest!

My point, blogs work, I don’t mean I’ve finally found a whole new audience to talk about fridges too, but that google and other search engines, like blogs. Which means they should be an integral part of any SEO strategy.

I’m reliably informed by Pancentrics very own SEO guru that my blog post success is only the start, it’s actually possible to set a blog to “ping” Google every time I make a post. Google then crawls the site and my new post can be on the first page of Google for relevant searches within minutes.

Paul, our SEO guru says,

“No other form of SEO activity can deliver results this fast.

Google treats blog posts like this as they are current up to the minute pieces of content and deserve to be at the top of search results at that time.

The flip side is that, without additional SEO activity to support them, blog posts can drop down the rankings for exactly the same reasons. However, this is just one more reason to keep your blog up to date; keep blogging about your subject area and you’ll be able to appear at the top of the search results permanently.”

Thanks for that Paul.

Now for the Acid test, type ‘A popstar ate my gerbil’ into google. Look who’s top.

(This phrase will only be top for about the next 72 hours, performance after this cannot be guaranteed, your home may be at risk if you don’t keep up repayments)

O.k I’ll admit it, I can’t resist a good quote, a sound bite if you will.

They can provide inspiration, help question commonly held beliefs, and always help illustrate a point in a presentation. Which is why I thought I’d share my current favourite from the legendary Jeremy Bullmore of WPP.

“Why is a Good Insight Like a Refrigerator?”
Because the moment you look into it, a light comes on.

An old quote, yes, but timeless and absolutely true I’m sure you’ll agree.