OK Google: What Is Voice Search?
How does voice search work? Voice search is a function that allows users to search online through spoken commands rather than typing. Available on a variety of devices; including smart phone, tablet, desktop and smart home assistants, voice search is becoming an increasingly popular form of search, with 50% of all searches across the internet predicted to be voice-based by 2020. Are people using Voice Search? Yes. Adoption of voice search is rapidly growing. With every smartphone device now supplied with some kind of voice-activated search functionality, it’s showing no signs of slowing down any time soon. 76% of smart home speaker users conduct local searches at least once a week—with 53% performing daily searches. (Source: BrightLocal Study) 1 in 5 adult’s uses mobile voice search at least one time a month. (Source: Global Web Index) 22% of smart home speaker owners have made a purchase using their device. (Source: Edison Research) 2 of 5 adults perform a voice search at least once a day. (Source: Location World) Shopping through voice activated devices is expected to increase by 48% by 2022, delivering £3.5bn worth of spend. (Source: OC&C Strategy Consultants) 85% of smart home speaker owners accept the recommendation given by their device. (Source: Edison Research) Individuals aged 26-35 represent the highest percentage of smart home device owners. (Source: Walker Sands) How to rank for voice search When a user initiates a voice search, only one answer will be provided, unlike when searching via traditional means. With that in mind, context is key. Ranking first in search engines is no longer a pre-requisite to appearing in voice searches – instead, context is key. Artificial Intelligence has increasingly become, well, more intelligent; increasingly capable of greater understanding, all powered by Google Hummingbird. The results shown for a given search term now take a number of factors in to account, including: Location Time of Day Content Lengths Mobile-Friendliness Security All important factors in determining when your website will, and will not rank, for a search term. To ensure your website is capable of competing for voice search rankings, we recommend the following activities at a minimum: Focus less on keywords, and more on conversations – human do not speak in keywords, rather than “best restaurants Newbury”, look at search terms such as “what are the best restaurants in Newbury”. Take an informal tone. Optimise your website with structured mark-up – to make it easier for search engines to find the answer to the searcher’s query. Build detailed answers for your content – search engines value quality. Ensure your website is mobile friendly and HTTPS secure. Optimise for local search – update Your Local Listings and develop your Google My Business information. Focus on local content – local queries are three times more likely on mobile devices than standard desktops. Encourage reviews – these are a fantastic indicator of quality and reliability. How we can help As an experienced SEO agency, and certified Google Partner, we can help your business rank for voice search, ensuring your website is best optimised from a content and technical perspective. Over the past 10 years, Google has continued to change the goal posts, but our philosophy and approach to search engine optimisation has remained the same; we always focus on the fundamentals and getting the basics right, before building upon our successes. Get in touch with an expert SEO consultant today, or give us a call on 01635 887 730.
2019 Marketing Trends For Smaller Marketing Budgets
E-commerce Not actually a new trend (Amazon, the world’s largest e-commerce website was launched in 1994!). 2019 will see the continued rise of e-commerce within our day to day lives. With more companies, such as the aforementioned Amazon and ASOS launching same day delivery in 2018, the ease and convenience of shopping online cannot be ignored. Businesses that failed to pivot to digital in time have begun to pay the price, with large brands such as House of Fraser, Toys R Us, and HMV, for the second time, going to administration into 2018. To ensure that your business is not losing out to competitors, it’s vital that your brand creates an online presence, and beginning, or growing, your e-commerce capabilities should be high on your to do list for 2019. Furthermore, it’s never been easier to set up an e-commerce store. 2018 saw the launch of Instagram Shopping, a new feature on the popular social media platform which allows your business to tag products in content claiming to create a seamless experience from post to purchase. Voice Search According to Comscore, by 2020, 50% of all searches will be voice searches. A few years ago, this prediction would have been laughable. However, with the increased usability and intelligence of tools such as Siri and Cortana, coupled with the increased ownership of Smart Home tools such as Google Assistant and Amazon Echo – it’s looking ever more likely that this prediction will come to pass. But, how do you prepare for this? Here are our top tips for ranking for voice searches in 2019: Focus on long tail keywords that are similar to how you would naturally ask someone a question. Mark up your website content to make it easier for search engines to find the answer to the searcher’s question – find out more here. Build detailed answers for your content, search engines value quality. Ensure your website is mobile friendly and HTTPS secure. Brexit It’s difficult to ignore the elephant in the room. Whilst it’s almost impossible to discern what effect Article 50 will have in 2019, it is likely that Brexit is coming, and marketers need to be prepared for it. Brexit has the potential to have overarching consequences throughout your entire business, small or large. From manufacturing and logistics, to promotion and price, every department will likely be affected. It will be your duty as a marketer to ensure that your business continues to identify, anticipate and satisfy customer requirements post-29th March. Personalisation A common trend in recent years, and becoming increasingly important. The improved capacity for collecting and understanding will allow for greater personalisation and customisation of the customer experience in 2019. Personalisation has changed from simply adding your customer’s first name on to an email. Users expect to receive content and communication that relates to their needs, with a business that understands their buying requirements, despite expecting increased privacy and greater care of how their data is handled post-GDPR. To achieve this, we’d recommend looking in to marketing automation. To find out more about why your business should invest in marketing automation – read our blog. Whatever 2019 brings, rest assured that Generate UK will be on hand to support you. Evolving with your business, we can help you achieve your 2019 marketing goals. To find out more, speak to one of our friendly marketing consultants today.
A Step by Step Guide to:
Instagram Advertising
Instagram was launched in 2010 as a simple image sharing app and quickly grew 1 million users within the first 2 months.
To start, Instagram advertising was only made available to large brands that had big marketing budgets, however in 2015 Instagram announced that all businesses now had access to create Instagram ads on a self-service basis, a change that would result in a big shift in the world of online advertising!
Fast forward just 8 years and Instagram is now used globally by over 1 billion users with 6 in 10 online adults having an Instagram account.
What is Instagram Advertising?
Instagram ads appear on an Instagram users feed
or story as a linear visual post,
seamlessly blending in with the user’s follower’s
organic posts for optimum engagement.
The ad can contain either a video, an image
or a carousel of numerous images.
How to create Instagram ads?
Before getting started with the creation and set up of your ad, you will first need to set up a Facebook business page, this is because Instagram ads are created using Facebook’s Ad Manager tool.
Note: this does not mean you then have to use your Facebook account if this platform is not relevant to your business. You can simply just set up an account in order to utilise Instagram advertising.
Step One: Set your objective
Your ad set up starts with you setting the objective of your advertising campaign, allowing you to decide what you want people to do when they see your ad. The Facebook Ad manager tool offers numerous advertising objectives to help you reach your business goals.
The three primary objectives being:
Awareness – If you want your ad to generate interest in your brand and product / services.
Brand Awareness
Reach
Consideration – If you want your ad to result in people thinking about your business and interacting with your website / app in order to gain more information.
Traffic
Engagement
App Installs
Video Views
Lead Generation
Messages
Conversions – If you want your ad to increase conversions, whether that be a purchase of your product/services, a visit to your shop, or signing up to a feature of your business.
Conversions
Catalogue Sales
Store Visits
Step Two: Target your Audience.
Instagram Ads allow you to target your ad using a range of demographic factors including; age, gender, location, language, work, financial status ect. As well as psychographic factors including; behaviours, interests and connections. So it’s even possible to target users that are following your competitors!
When inputting your targeting data, the tool will automatically calculate the reach and potential return from your ad, allowing you to get the most out of your targeting!
Step Three: Determine your Budget.
Instagram budgeting works similarly to Facebook and Google advertising, so if you’re familiar with those platforms this should not be overly challenging for you!
Instagram allows you to choose between setting either a daily or lifetime budget. Setting a daily budget will give you the reassurance that you are in control of how your budget is being spent each day, however a lifetime budget allows you to spend more of your budget on optimal days, ensuring optimum reach. Whichever budgeting option you choose, Instagram gives you the control to pause or stop your campaign at any time, so go ahead and experiment with your budgeting!
Step Four: Get Creative with your ad!
Now you can select where you want your ad to appear, on either Facebook, Instagram or even both!
When creating new ad content, you can choose between Instagram’s different formats:
Photo Ads: Photos can be in square or landscape format and will appear as a sponsored post when a user is scrolling through their image feed.
Video Ads: Videos can be up to 60 seconds long and can be in square or landscape format, the video ad will appear as a sponsored post when a user is scrolling through their image feed.
Carousel Ads: Similarly to photo ads, but this feature allows you to choose multiple photos to add a layer of depth to your campaign.
Stories ads: Ads appear seamlessly a sponsored story when a user is viewing their follower’s story.
You then simply upload your ad content, whether it be an image, video or slideshow and choose your Call-to-Action button:
Apply Now
Book Now
Contact Us
Call Now
Download
Step Five: Publish!
Once your ad is ready, you can review your formation, preview the ad, and publish it!
And don’t forget, Instagram provide you with performance data, within your Facebook Ads manager tool, so you can measure the success of your campaign. This allows you to continuously optimise your ads based on your previous performance, enabling you to continue to get the best engagement from your Ads.
Instagram Advertising provides a unique opportunity for your business to extend its footprint in the marketing environment and to test things which you previously may not have been able to experiment with before. If you would like advice or guidance on setting up and managing your Instagram ads, get in touch today!
How To Build Valuable Backlinks
What Is A Backlink? Backlinks are links from outside domains that point to pages on your domain – essentially linking back from their domain to yours. The total number of backlinks can often include many links from the same or multiple referring domains. Generally speaking, backlinks are considered to be a “vote” of confidence for the content that’s being linked to your domain from outside sources. For Search Engines, backlinks help to determine the page’s importance, value and authority, showing how popular or important your pages are. What Makes A Good Backlink? Previously, the quantity of backlinks was an indicator of a page’s popularity. Today however, due to the way backlinks are evaluated based on different industry-related ranking factors, it is more about the quality of sites from which the links are coming. The quality of your backlink is dependent on how relevant they are to the content on your website. No matter if the link is being followed or not, being mentioned or having a link of a high quality website will give your website and brand awareness a boost. The quality of backlinks are based on Sharing Page Strength/Page Strength Spread, there are many names for this but ultimately it is the strength of a page that is linking back to your site. These vary in metrics dependent on the tools that you use. Equally, the backlinks that you hold on your website can also have an impact on your website value too, so always ensure that the pages you’re linking to, the anchor text you use and any Meta tags associated with the linking page are relevant to your page and overall website goals. How To Gain Quality Backlinks? There’s no magic formula when creating good quality backlinks, they are time consuming to gain, but a great return on investment as they are very valuable for your SEO authority. We understand that when you’re starting to gain backlinks from the beginning you will have nothing to go from, however that is where competitor research comes in, you can look at your high ranking competitor’s current and previous backlinks to see what websites and which industries they target and any that might be useful to you. There are a many things that you can do to gain backlinks, we have collated our favourite: Guest blogging – I’m sure you are writing your own blogs already, (if not, why not!?) but why not write guest blogs too. Once you have found websites that accept guest blogging, you should write a blog relevant to both your business and also the website that you are looking to post on. This article is building your business reputation, so ensure it is professional and portrays the correct company values. Supplier testimonials – Testimonials on your website look great, you encourage your customers to write them, and as would your suppliers too! So why not write them a testimonial about how their product/service has enhanced your business, just request that they link back to your website once online! Sponsors / event pages – If you are sponsoring or attending an event, make sure you tell the world! Often, these events have pages for exhibitor and sponsor lists etc. so ensure you send over a logo and a link to your website! Increase networking – Networking doesn’t just have to be a face to face physical exchange, but you can also build up relationships online via social media, forums and blogs! Engage with people on these platforms, sharing useful advice, linking to blog posts of yours too, this will not only give you increase backlinking but also be seen as a thought leader within your industry and increase brand awareness. Trustworthy directories – Not only do directories provide you with more backlinks, they also are a great way for your clients to find your contact information online too. Quality directories are important, we suggest find industry or locational specific directories, as often low quality directories have been excluded from Google’s search results. How To Manage Your Backlinks? Keeping track of your backlinks is important, not only so you are aware which sites are linking back to you but also you can find out how to the anchor text of the backlink uses keywords relating to your website. A few tools that we would recommend are SEM Rush and Search Metrics. These tools all allow you to discover the page your website has been referred from, how many pages from your website have been indexed and some sort of domain authority score that they hold. You can also discover your backlinks in Google Analytics, you can look into your referral traffic sources and from there you can discover the specific pages you hold backlinks from, this will also show you the behaviour statistics that these users hold too. If you’d like any advice or some more information about how you can enhance your SEO with our range of digital marketing solution, contact us today! You don’t have to take our word for it, find out what our clients think.
LinkedIn’s New Content Suggestions Feature
The new ‘Content Suggestions’ tab within a companies’ page admin view allows you to explore suggested content around the goals of your business, as well as the wants of your audience. This allows you to tailor your feed to make it more relevant to your industry and business, making it easier to find interesting articles and share relevant news via LinkedIn – similar to twitter’s ‘Lists’ feature. How to use LinkedIn’s Content Suggestions Effectively To discover new topics and articles that your audience are engaging with, you have to select an initial filter of either your page followers, your employees or all LinkedIn members. Then you have the choice to select multiple industries, locations, job function and then seniority of the audience you wish to look into. Once selected your proposed filter, it will give you an estimated audience size. You can edit and adjust filters to however specific and narrow you want to look into. Once you audience is submitted it returns a feed of recent and relevant news articles to your business and your audience selected. To narrow more specifically into trending topics and articles already shown for your selected audience, you can filter the content further by specific topic, simply type in a topic name and add this to your filter. You can easily sort content by most recent, most or least engagement using the ‘Sort by’ drop down. If you find a piece of content relevant to your business, simply click the share button, add the relevant text, mentions and hashtags and share this across your business feed. Social Media Services Social Media management can be complex, there are a number of tools, techniques and tips that are useful when managing your social media account. If you would like to find out more about Generate UK’s social media management services, contact our team today.
The Power of Direct Mail
As an agnostic full-source, digital marketing agency with a host of long-standing, print clients. We have a wealth of experience in providing business solutions across the marketing spectrum – be that via traditional methods or ever-evolving digital marketing services. Direct mail marketing has been around for over a century and – just like the world of digital marketing – has seen many advancements since then – with plenty of data proving the effectiveness of direct marketing. Tried and Tested Direct mail has been trusted for over a century. It’s easy to personalise your direct mail campaign the same way you would with email marketing, adding to the level of consumer trust and value felt by your customers and prospects. Direct mail marketing also has a proven ROI and has the power to pose a call to action that resonates. Build Brand Awareness With an estimated 88% of brands using social media, platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter can be very effective in boosting brand awareness, driving web traffic and even bolstering SEO. However, though social media has brought many opportunities to marketers, it is important not to forget the many benefits that direct mail can bring to your business. And with nearly 80% of consumers claiming that they open all of their postal mail, you can be almost certain that you will get your message in front of the right people. Compared to email, direct marketing is less ephemeral; a prospect is far less likely to view an email more than once, whereas a physical piece direct mail can sometimes leave a longer-lasting brand presence for your customer. Versatile Audience(s) Though your parents or grandparents may be very digitally savvy, recent research shows that 4.2 million people aged 65 or over have never used the internet, meaning that these users are unreachable by PPC, Email or Social Media or Search Engine marketing. If you have a diverse or general target audience (perhaps a supermarket or insurance company) or are targeting prospects aged 65+, using direct mail means that you can extend your online strategy, campaigns and offers to these older, audience segments. Post-GDPR Communications The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has now been in place for over 6 months and the new data protection laws have forced markers to think more carefully about how we build relationships with customers and prospects – and which mediums are employed to do so. Despite its initial challenges, it’s important for all marketers to realise that GDPR is a huge positive – with tighter security; more consumer trust; and more relevant and qualified audience pools. Furthermore, 70% of consumers say mail makes them feel valued and 33% of people find direct mail the most effective way to remember a product – further proof that direct mail is still alive and kicking. What About Millennials & Gen Z? We’ve previously discussed the needs and desires of Millennials and Generation Z. Using an average of three and five screens respectively, young prospects have grown up in an age of constant technological advancement. However, Millennials and Gen Z also prefer brands that are honest and authentic, some marketers may be surprised to learn that these segments do respond well to direct marketing. In fact, these younger recipients respond to direct mail quicker than any other age group. Direct Mail: Something to Consider Personalisation, trustworthiness and a physical reminder for your prospects – direct mail continues to provide a wealth of opportunities for modern marketers, particularly as part of a broader, omnichannel campaign, providing you with multiple touchpoints via different mediums with your prospects. After all, mail does still work! 45% of mail recipients have made an inquiry or requested information by phone after receiving mail; 36% have bought something; and 29% have visited a store. Here at Generate UK, our team has 20 years’ experience in the print industry. We offer a full, end to end solution, to aid you with your next direct marketing campaign. To find out more, browse our print services or Contact Us today.
‘Gutenberg’: WordPress 5.0 Update
Try out the new editor here. (Note: It’s a good idea to click on the cog in the top right corner before you start editing, as this provides a better impression of how the editor appears within WordPress itself). The WordPress community widely anticipated that this would be released in 2019, however this was dramatically brought forward, and the update launched on Thursday 6 December. Central to the update is Gutenberg, however there is more to the update, which you can read about here. This is by far the biggest change that has ever been made to WordPress. It could fundamentally change the way that many WordPress sites are built – rather than using WordPress concepts such as shortcodes, custom meta fields, custom post types, and potentially plugins such as Advanced Custom Fields to build pages. Instead it will become necessary to build ‘custom blocks’ for page areas containing dynamic content, which are optimised for the new editor. Similarly, because the new editor provides far more powerful capabilities for end users to customise the appearance of page areas, WordPress themes will need to be designed in such a way that they can accommodate these customisations without any compatibility issues. In the longer term, WordPress are planning some even more radical changes – other WordPress components such as Widgets and Menus will be replaced by a block-based approach as well, and it will become possible to edit entire websites in a more visual way. Ultimately building/managing a WordPress site is likely to involve an experience that is more similar to using one of a page builder WP plugins, such as Visual Composer. The new editor has sharply divided opinion within the WordPress community. On the one hand, for users who are moderately technically inclined, but who don’t necessarily have much knowledge of HTML coding, the new editor provides many opportunities for advanced customisation of the appearance of their webpages. The concept of ‘blocks’ also unifies many disparate elements of WordPress which have emerged over the years, so these changes provide a more consistent unified experience. On the other hand, the new editor provides so many new capabilities and controls, that some users may find the interface overwhelming. It might also be harder to achieve certain things, since there is potentially less control over the structure of the HTML the editor produces. There are also many concerns that the new editor is being released “before it is ready” – i.e. there is a big risk of compatibility issues for existing sites (e.g. resulting in existing content edited using the new editor ‘breaking’), problems with third party plugins, and/or there may be unexpected bugs when using the editor controls. How Can Generate UK Help You? In the short term, the immediate priority is to minimise the risk of any compatibility issues upon your website, and to avoid any nasty surprises. If your website is on WordPress, Generate UK can install a new ‘Classic Editor‘ plugin, as we know that the new update involves significant changes to the underlying WordPress code, and the new editor is now built using an advanced JavaScript Framework. Contact our talented team today so we can ensure you website is completely compatible, ironing out any bugs that this new update may cause, make the most of the new editing capabilities, as well as providing you with any training you may need on how to use use the new editor. Make sure these changes are made as soon as possible, and before your WordPress installation is upgraded to v5.0, so you don’t get caught out.
How To Rank Number One On Google
Be realistic when choosing your keywords Let’s face it, as much as we’d like to rank for number one for every keyword, it’s not going to happen. Businesses, especially in such a competitive environment, need to be smart in the keywords that they want to target. For example, if you run a small burger restaurant in Bolton, you’re not going to rank 1st for “UK Burger Restaurant”, especially with competitors such as McDonalds and Burger King. However, you would be in a strong position to rank well in your local area for a term such as “Best Burger in Bolton”. To find the keywords that will help you rank number one on Google, we recommend using a free tool such as Google’s Keyword Planner to find relevant search terms with low competition that can boost traffic to your website. Other useful tools to try are Moz’s Keyword Explorer and SEM Rush’s Keyword Research. Optimise your website content In 2018, relevancy is key. If your content is not relevant to your target search term you will not rank. It’s important to ensure to ensure that your frequently use your target keyword within your chosen page to help give it the best possible chance of ranking. When optimising your page for the first time, we recommend focusing on the following key areas. URL: www.yourwebsite.com/your-chosen-keyword. Meta Title: Your Chosen Keyword | Your Business Name. Headings: H1, H2, H3 etc. Your page copy. Every two days we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilisation up until 2003. That is a lot for search engine algorithms to crawl on a daily basis. Optimising the Meta Titles and Headings will help search engines gather an idea of what your content is about. Including your target keyword is a must in this instance. However, be careful not to overstuff your content with your target keyword, as this can negatively impact your page’s ranking ability. Create lots of content Bill Gates said it best 22 years ago, when he declared that ‘content is king’. Previously an optional activity, content marketing is now one of the key ingredients to any successful SEO strategy. An effective content marketing plan can help your business rank, not only for more keywords, but also aid your efforts to rank for priority keywords. This is because, in most cases, more content equates to more links back to your website. However, this is only the case if the content you are producing is engaging and of a high-quality. For example, if you sell golf equipment, you may be looking to target “golf clubs” as one of your priority keywords. This will be the keyword that you use on your main product page. Your content strategy can support this by targeting keywords around the main keyword, in this case: How are golf clubs made? What are best golf clubs for a driving range? What golf clubs should you have in your bag? What are the best golf clubs for a beginner? Not only do these titles support your priority keyword in its ranking position, but they provide interesting, informative content that your audience would find interesting. Answer The Public is a useful tool when developing your content marketing plan to find the questions your target audience is asking around a keyword. How We Can Help Over the past 10 years, Google has continued to change the goal posts, but our SEO philosophy and approach have remained the same. We always focus on the SEO fundamentals and getting the basics right, before building upon our successes. But don’t just take our word for it, discover how we helped London & Partners drive better quality traffic to their website. To find out how our SEO services can benefit your business, get in touch with one of our expert marketing consultants today.
The (mis) Representation of Women in the Media
Last month, Generate UK attended Technology for Marketing 2018 at the London Olympia. Having spent the day chatting to some really interesting marketing technology providers and attending strategic keynotes and panel sessions, one panel discussion in particular caught our eye – ‘The (mis)Representation of Women in Media’. Having previously written before about the role of marketing and social change, we were keen to attend this panel session on the (mis)representation of women in the media. Since women first got the vote 100 years ago, the move towards diversity and equality has seemed to move at glacial pace – so why is diversity still falling short of what we want to see in ads, films, news and workplaces, and more? More importantly, what are our favourite brands doing about it? The Technology for Marketing panel was hosted by Patricia DuChene, Vice-President of Sales at project management app, Wrike, who welcomed panellists; Lynne Parker, Monique Ellis and Sheridan Ash, as well as self-proclaimed ‘token man’, Luke Dowding. The panel observed that, while marketing technology has become more and more sophisticated in helping brands create incredibly targeted campaigns, ads themselves are so often still misrepresenting 50% of the world’s population – if represented at all! The panel more widely discussed the lack of diversity in the media; film, TV, marketing, advertising and more. With regards to advertising in particular, the panellists cited a ‘cycle of inequality’, in which, ads do not truly represent a diverse audience, thus, does not appeal to a diverse audience, so less people will purchase, as the brand, product, series, or advert generally – is not represented as being ‘for’ them. Older women, in particular, are not even represented in adverts that should be targeting them, or including them in their targeting. Similarly, pregnant women and new mums are only seen in this ‘cookie cutter’ image – appearing in ads for formula or nappies – but not for much else. Lynne Parker, founder of women’s comedy community, Funny Women, observed that ‘When we do see diversity, the media tends to rely on tropes and stereotypes as ‘safety nets’ to tick diversity boxes.’ Meanwhile, other brands have been accused of ‘jumping on the feminism bandwagon’ and using women almost as a novelty – or a fashion statement in their ads. The past few years has seen a trend in ‘femvertising’, that is, employing ad content – in any format – that includes messaging, imagery and rhetoric to empower women and girls. Capitalising on a social movement, essentially. A good example of this is Audi’s ‘Daughter’ campaign that premiered during the 2017 Super Bowl, making a progressive statement about gender-equality. Inspirational right? Or rather, it would be, if Audi positioned themselves more whole-heartedly as a brand supporting gender equality and women’s rights… though for the luxury car manufacturer, this seemed a little out of the blue and the ad divided viewers, with many taking issue with the fact that Audi don’t appear to practice what they preach in the way of ‘progression [being] for everyone’ #Audi would never hire your daughter pic.twitter.com/n4lJPnKdmV — Rut (@rutesperanza) February 6, 2017 do you also give equal opportunity to advance to executive levels? Your website list 2 women and 12 men on the executive team — Except For Turnip (@BuchbergerJm) February 1, 2017 Equally, the ad did contribute and fuel to important conversations in a post-Trump-election world. It’s ads such as ‘Daughter’ that had the panel discussing whether brands have to ‘go to extremes’ to challenge societal and media norms? Take a look at these two Special K adverts. The brand – that has historically targeted women, released this ad in 2013: This one was released late last year: Same signature, curly, red ‘K’; same cereal, same target audience, even – but very different representation of that audience. Rather than paint their target audience as women whose biggest concern is whether their swimsuit is their ‘number one enemy, or new best friend’…Special K are now not only more accurately representing their audience – a diverse audience of women who just want breakfast, not a ‘swimsuit ready’ meal plan – but Special K’s images of women are empowering, particularly when paired with the tag line ‘everything we’re made of, powers everything you’re made of’. Following a complete, brand reposition, Special K’s latest ad proves that diversity isn’t rocket science, and. In actual fact, brands don’t have to ‘go to extremes’, or even take a socio-political stand point in order to be inclusive and representative. As Audi demonstrated in 2017, making a broader, social comment with an ad campaign can be a big risk that will not always pay off (*cough* Pepsi). However, sportswear giant, Nike, were ready and willing to take that risk earlier this year, releasing a series of ads commenting on the sports industry’s attitude to diversity and inequality. It was not a great year for tennis this year, in the way of the sport’s double standards. At the 2018 US Open, French player, Alize Cornet, was penalised with a code violation for changing her top, meanwhile male players – namely Novac Djokovic were permitted to sit for minutes with no shirt on at all. Similarly, the French Open caused controversy multiple times, with its president suggesting champion, Serena Williams, be banned from wearing a black bodysuit. Just days later, Williams accused the umpire of her game against Naomi Osaka of sexism. Nike had something to say: Unfortunately, the issue goes far beyond the issue of the exclusion of women, rather, there is a problem with the lack of diversity and intersectionality across the board (Exhibit A – Audi’s board of directors…). With their 30th anniversary of ‘Just Do It’ campaign, Nike challenged these disparities, with the above image of Serena Williams being just one of the empowering, socio-political images released by Nike. American football quarterback, Colin Kaepernick, protested police violence and the oppression of people of colour by not standing for the American National Anthem. Nike also donated to Kaepernick’s “Know Your Rights” campaign. By taking an unequivocal, political stance on social change, Nike’s somewhat risky decision to stand with sporting figures that have been at the centre of recent controversy resulted in a 31% increase in sales, expanding the industry giant’s market value by a colossal $6 billion. As a result Nike’s controversial ‘Just Do It’ campaign serves as a perfect example of TfM panellist, Lynne Parker’s, closing sentiment that ‘when companies get [diversity and inclusion] right, people buy their products’. Perhaps Nike’s incredible success will pave the way for more ads like this in 2019… Want expert advice on where to take your next marketing campaign? Contact Generate UK today, or take a look at the wide variety of projects that we have delivered.
