A great video presentation from David McCandless. We’ll all be familiar with the challenge of trying to explain the data that we generate for the our clients from campaigns that we run for them.  Perhaps we’re approaching this in entirely the wrong way… greater levels of visualisation could be a way for us to tell more compelling stories for our client about how successful the campaign has been (and by implication how great we are at our jobs). I particularly like the “timeline of global media panic” http://www.ted.com/talks/david_mccandless_the_beauty_of_data_visualization.html Enjoy, Phil Phil Burgess Head of Client Services, Full published article at: Read More »

Hooray! We’ve been shortlisted for the 2010 DADI Awards! Our work for Virgin Holidays is up for ‘Best Use of Organic Search’ and our “Summer’s Hottest Playlist” campaign is in the running for the ’Digital Media Strategy’ award. Looking forward to November when we find out if we win… , Full published article at: Read More »

Setting the scene: Facebook Places was announced yesterday and saw Facebook make their long awaited first steps into geolocation, an area currently dominated by Foursquare and Gowalla. These location based social apps are becoming more popular amongst business and marketers as a way to target people at specific locations, for example checking in at a Starbucks to earn rewards and free coffee. They have huge potential for campaigns, but are currently hindered by relatively small user numbers; they rely mainly on early adopters and have yet to really penetrate the lives of the average social network user. Why is Facebook significant?Read More »

Group Account Director Alastair Boyle is looking forward to presenting at Figaro Digital’s SEO & PPC event at The Hospital this Thursday, August 4th. His session ‘All search and no marketing?’ will cover the following: In a world dominated by technology and algorithms, search marketing can often be all search and no marketing. In this session, Steak goes beyond the buzzword ‘integration’ and draws on real world examples to show how best to use search as part of the marketing mix. We’ll look at how search can integrate with brand campaigns as well direct response, how it...Read More »

Swiftcover.com is set to become the first insurer to use in-game advertising. The new brand campaign will feature virtual billboards in games such as Pro Evolution Soccer; Guitar Hero, Tiger Woods PGA Tour and Blur (a racing game).  The ads will run through August and September on Xbox Live. The in-game ads will tie into Swiftcover’s “Get a Life” advertising campaign theme featuring Iggy Pop and the “Little Iggy” puppet. Tina Shortle, Marketing Director for AXA Insurance and swiftcover.com, commented on the initiative, “Swiftcover and Steak have worked closely together over the past five years to stay ahead of the competition. We...Read More »

By Gareth Owen, Search Engine Watch, July 28, 2010 My last post, “What’s Next for Search, SEO?,” managed to produce some interesting takes on the future, past, and present of devices and how we use them/optimize for them. Thanks for your responses. They got me thinking — what year am I stuck in? The simple answer is that I never quite came to terms with the ’90s. Having been born in 1980, I just couldn’t accept that a new decade had anything to do with me. Plus, my...Read More »

Very pleased that the work we’ve done for British Gas Business has been shortlisted for ‘Best Use of Search’ in this year’s B2B Marketing Awards. Sadly we have to wait until November to see if we win, so fingers crossed until then…, Full published article at: Read More »

From Gareth Owen, Head of SEO… “Calls to action in TV ads will be hugely important for SEO – the iPad will be sat on someone’s lap while they watch TV and it will be SO easy to get them to do a search for ‘LCD TVs’ and click on the Dixons result. Even if it is in P5 you can still ask people to do it – the clickthroughs from that alone are a massive ranking factor. Beyond SEO, I think this does cement a whole new way of advertising to people on TV – ‘Download our app now’, ‘play our...Read More »

Steak has been appointed by DSG international plc (‘DSGi’), one of Europe’s leading specialist electrical retailing groups and UK market leaders, to work on behalf of its UK brands Currys, Dixons.co.uk and PC World. The account, won in a four-way agency pitch, will see Steak provide search engine optimisation services to DSGi, creating defined natural search strategies for each of the three brands to achieve online revenue targets and effective integration with other digital and offline marketing activities. Gareth Owen, Head of Natural Search at Steak said, “This is an exciting opportunity to enhance the digital face of three major retail...Read More »

It’s finally official. Google will, with hardware partners, offer a TV solution that combines web access, streaming video and broadcast TV – including side-by-side browsing and viewing. Not their first foray into TV, but the first one that’s consumer focused. Now it’s only available in the US this Autumn, so the impact of this for UK advertisers is over the horizon, but here’s my first thoughts. Will the public use it? As a digital and technology enthusiast one of my first reactions was “at last”. Let’s contrast that with my fiancée. She works in digital too – but isn’t interested in gadgets. Her...Read More »