News

Norwich Union is in the process of re-branding to become Aviva. A multi-million pound advertising campaign is being used to build awareness to their 3 core audiences: consumers, intermediaries/brokers and shareholders. 

The advertising campaign has already caused a stir, showcasing famous celebrities who have changed their names. Among them Bruce Willis changed his name from Walter Willis, Richard Starkey became Ringo Starr and Eleanor Gow became better known as Elle MacPherson.  

Soup have developed the microsite to support the through the line campaign developed by AMV BBDO.  The site, which clearly and concisely explains the reasons behind the name change and the impact to each of the 3 categories, is simple to navigate with information presented in an easily digestible format.  The site also streams the TV advert so that people can re-watch the advertising campaign.

The site will continue to evolve over the next 6 months in tandem with the advertising campaign.

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Kettle Foods have appointed Soup, without pitch, to redesign their site and manage their online marketing over the coming year.

As you can imagine, we're itching to start. Work begins this month with a campaign launch in conjunction with a new on-pack promotion.

Adam Lee, Head of Natural Search at Soup, has been considering the whys and wherefores of Google's SearchWiki.

The launch of Google’s Searchwiki has caused a huge buzz within the online community but I feel many have jumped on the bandwagon too soon. My immediate thought is why would anyone use it?

The Google Searchwiki product potentially allows users to customise their own results. It can also be used to manipulate and improve either your own, or your clients’ rankings and, therefore, create a huge bias in the search results. But, the concept of the search engine is to find the relevant results. If you are prescribing the results you want to see, why use the search engine? Google states that the Searchwiki interface will have no impact on its traditional results, but the data they will collect through Searchwiki will help Google to develop their algorithms. Due to the amount of bias that will exist within this data it can’t fail to have a potentially problematic impact on Google’s search results.

An interesting SERoundtable poll recently asked if the public is ready for Searchwiki. And 83% said no. From an SEO point of view, I think the old algorithms are still far more important than Searchwiki and will continue to be for a considerable time yet.

It’s not all bad though, one thing Searchwiki can do is help Google to identify spam sites. So, if a lot of users remove a result or give it negative comments Google will recognise this and prioritise its search results accordingly. Spam has been a big problem for Google lately and any ways to address and combat this will be of great benefit to them.

However, Google already develops algorithms to make spamming the engine more difficult. If Searchwiki becomes part of the ranking algorithm then it is only a matter of time before companies pop up offering services to vote up and comment on your sites and vote down and negatively comment on your competitors’ sites. All it takes is a few hundred Google accounts and let’s face it, a proxy server and a bit of time can get anyone 10-20 accounts!