Working with Ben The Illustrator, Fiasco created an interactive glossary of terms to make the world of theatre more accessible to people from different backgrounds. 

Developed as part of The Hub, The Old Vic Theatre offers free digital learning resources designed to welcome anyone of any age, experience or ability, into the world of theatre. Playing a key role is an “interactive glossary” of theatre-related terms, created by Fiasco Design. 

The educational microsite aims to debunk the jargon often associated with theatre. Setting the experience on a stage, visitors are guided through an animated performance that explores the different roles, responsibilities and inner-workings of the theatre. Exploring the site, visitors learn about the many different people who help to run the theatre on a day-to-day basis. Visitors can watch and explore at their own pace, scrubbing back and forth to discover, revisit and learn.

“We want viewers to feel like they’ve stepped into our world and discovered something new and unexpected on their own terms.” Magid Elbushra, Digital Content Producer, The Old Vic Theatre.

It was a pleasure to collaborate with Ben The Illustrator and The Old Vic on this microsite. Right from the start we were aligned on a more experiential approach, turning the passive action of watching into something active, engaging and fun.” Mike Frost, Digital Lead, Fiasco Design.

The colours are inspired by The Old Vic’s interior: opulent shades of reds and gold contrast a suite of deep and electric blues. The aim was to capture the atmospheric qualities of stage lighting by splitting the colour into ‘light’ and ‘dark’ themes, which mimic theatrical lighting effects. 

“I’m very proud of what we collaborated on, it was a pleasure to work with the Fiasco team and will always state that setting the whole experience on-stage with the lit/unlit approach was a stroke of Fiasco genius!” Ben O’Brien – Ben the Illustrator.

You can view the project case study on Fiasco’s site here. 

We are delighted to have won the Best Use of Search B2B and Most Innovative PPC Campaign at the UK Search Awards 2022 UK.  

The UK Search Awards took place at the Bloomsbury Big Top in London this month, November 30. The evening is the premiere annual event for the digital industry in the UK, celebrating the best of SEO, PPC and content marketing across the country. 

The two awards were in recognition of our work driving global revenue for an ISO consultancy firm based in the UK. It follows hot on the heels of Launch winning PPC Campaign of the Year for the same client at the UK Agency Awards in October. 

The judges said: “The Launch campaign had a great innovative approach with value-based bidding. They had clear, ambitious targets which were all achieved. Overall, an impressive and successful campaign.” 

Jaye Cowle, Founder and Managing Director of Launch, was delighted with the award: “Our mission is to be the happiest performance agency. I believe that happy people do great work, and by empowering our team to do their best, we continue to get impressive results for our clients.”  

See the full list of winners on the UK Search Awards 2022 website here. 

Writing for marketing purposes is a little different from other types of writing. You can forget some of the rules you were taught at school, but that’s not to say grammar and fact-checking should go out the window. Longer pieces such as feature articles and business blogs might be a bit daunting for those new to marketing, or even those who are suffering from creative block, so here are a few top tips that might not only help get you started, but also keep the words flowing.

Have a plan – For longer pieces it’s helpful to start with bullet points. Map out what you want to say to make sure there’s a sensible flow to the whole piece. You may be perfectly confident in everything you want to say but pouring out what’s in your head onto the page, without planning the structure first can be a costly mistake. Bullet points don’t need to be massively detailed, and don’t need to take hours of your time, but they might save you hours of editing, so they’re a worthwhile investment.

Just write – Once you have your broad structure, start writing. I have worked with many copywriters in the past and some feel the need to agonise over every sentence to make them word perfect as they write. But when you have finished the whole piece, sentences will get cut and you will find better ways to phrase the points you’ve made. So, the important thing is to make a start.

An empty page is so much more intimidating than a page full of copy. You can and indeed should always edit when you’ve finished anyway, to make sure the piece works as a whole and flows as you intended, so you don’t need to aim for perfection on your first draft. I’m not suggesting you produce substandard work, but if you spend an inordinate amount of time trying to perfect every sentence as you go, you will leave yourself no time for the all-important editing process. I have witnessed deadlines being missed before because a writer was so determined to achieve perfection, which obviously isn’t going to meet anyone’s objectives!

Get your facts straight – Whether you are writing a profile piece on your business, or a blog about an important issue in your industry, it’s often useful to include some facts and figures to provide context. To give you an example, when I write an article about blogging for business, I might start with a statistic about how many businesses blog. With some words wrapped around this figure, it shows readers why it’s important that they read on. Or why I am writing about that topic. It also demonstrates that you have done your research and what you say can be trusted, building authority for the brand you’re writing for.

Be useful – It can be tempting to make your copy all about you, but the most interesting copy offers thoughts, opinions, advice, or market information that are useful to your target audience. It’s sometimes helpful to think about one person – someone you would really like to work with – and write for them. What would they like to know? What would make their lives easier? Don’t take your experience for granted – other people want to know what you know. If you identify who you’re writing for at the beginning of the process and keep them in mind throughout, it will also help you ensure you stay on message for the entirety of the piece.

Edit. I read any piece of written work I create multiple times once I’ve finished it, making sure I have a break in between readings too. It is possible to stop seeing what’s right in front of you when you are constantly looking at the same piece of work.

Sometimes you get so caught up trying to get just the right phrase and then fall in love with the way you’ve said something that you lose sight of the fact it doesn’t fit in that spot or isn’t relevant to the overall argument of the piece at all. This is less likely to happen if you have written your bullet points up front, but we all veer off course sometimes.

Read your copy through on completion by all means – I always find reading it out loud helps identify any glaring errors – but then move onto something else, go for a walk, have your lunch, or ideally come back to it the next day. Take a break from the copy before completing your final one or two edits. The more changes you make, the more likely you are to need to take a break before reading it through again.

Writing longer copy can be a daunting task, especially if you have to do it consistently with regular marketing features or business blog posts. But if you take it one step at a time, plan it carefully, remember who you’re writing for and why you’re writing it, and edit it at the end, you will soon have the pages of copy you want.

 

UWE Bristol has unveiled its new immersive Sound Shower experience at Bristol’s Cribbs Causeway and Cabot Circus. Showing a mesmeric snapshot of campus life, the film was created by Skylark Media.

Filming took place at the university’s Frenchay campus and city with the support of student contributors. Multiple locations include the Atrium cafe, Centre for Sport, student union, library, as well as at the Arnolfini in the city centre.

The UWE Bristol sound shower experience at the Mall at Cribbs.

Stephanie Lee, Marketing Communications Manager at UWE Bristol says, ‘This is a really exciting film project with Skylark Media where we’re creating a film for a specific sound shower unit which will sit in Cabot Circus and Cribbs Causeway shopping centres to promote the university and bring campus life to the people of Bristol, so they can get a real immersive experience and sense of what it’s like to study here on our campuses.’

Skylark Media MD Jo Haywood adds, ‘For a unique out of home experience, we came up with a fully immersive concept using an Insta 360 camera on an extendable pole. It sits within the stitch line which then becomes invisible in post-production. The result is a fully immersive film that mimics a FPV drone – flying around from location to location or locking into subjects for detail. Diegetic sound is added in so that the viewer can eavesdrop into those private moments.’

You can experience UWE Bristol’s immersive Sound Shower at Cribbs Causeway or Cabot Circus this month.

Bopgun, a brand, strategy and digital agency, has been selected from a number of agencies to support Puzzler Media with the UX, design and development for a new lead generating B2B website.

Puzzler Media is the UK’s largest supplier of printed and digital puzzle-based content, backed up by end-to-end content management and support. With over 50 years’ experience, Puzzler Media is the go-to name in puzzles, working with business worldwide from national and regional newspapers to magazines, membership organisations and individual brands.

With only a consumer-facing website, Puzzler Media identified the need for a new B2B website to improve their online presence, increase brand awareness and ultimately generate leads. The website will showcase the huge range of puzzles on offer, alongside solutions to deliver content and client case studies that demonstrate their experience and capability – all delivered in a clean and user-friendly design.

“B2B is an exciting and growing part of our business. We help a multitude of clients in supplying print and digital puzzle content and tech solutions. We didn’t have a site that reflected the breadth of content and the quality of our client base. We chose Bopgun because, based on the good work we have seen them deliver for other clients, we believed they were the best agency to deliver our Puzzler Business Partnerships ‘shop-window’. We’re really excited to be partnering with them on this project.” Lynda Newland, Deputy MD, Puzzler Media.

Launched in 2008, Bopgun is a multi-disciplined creative agency with an unrivalled background across the publishing industry. With both the founders having worked in various roles at Future Publishing for over 14 years between them, Bopgun has grown into a substantial and distinguished company working with some of the world’s leading industry players including Elsevier, Story House Egmont, Anthem Media, Hachette Partworks and Kelsey Media to name a few.

From engaging websites for the likes of Marvel and Disney, to e-commerce subscription sites, promotional campaigns, animations and illustrations, Bopgun prides itself on delivering real value to the publishing industry.

“We were thrilled when we heard we’d won this project with such a prestigious brand as Puzzler, known by their existing clients as the UK’s largest puzzle supplier. Knowing how important it is for their business to convey their detailed and wide range of puzzles is the sort of challenge we love!”  David Mathews, Managing Director at Bopgun.

 

Image courtesy of Freepik.

Listening to podcasts is a great way to inspire and inform your creativity. We asked members of the Bristol Creative Industries LinkedIn group, which has over 7,400 members, to share their recommendations. Happy listening!


Creative Boom

Created by the magazine dedicated to the creative industry, the Creative Boom Podcast features candid conversations with artists and designers about their creative journeys. Listen here.

Recommended by Ellen Carroll.


Machine Unlearning

This is a podcast that “questions assumptions in the tech world and celebrates those working with technology in unconventional ways.” Listen here.

Recommended by Jessica Morgan (see Jessica’s BCI profile for Carnsight Communications here). 


The PR Hub Podcast

Hosted by Adam Tuckwell and Jon Wilcox, the PR Hub Podcast is a conversational PR and marcoms podcast with special guests discussing the world of communications. Listen here

Recommended by Gina Jones.


The GYDA Initiative Talks Podcast

This podcast includes interviews and discussions between Robert Craven and digital agency experts providing insights to help you grow your digital agency. Listen here.

Recommended by Robert Craven.


Wales Documentary Support Network

This podcast focuses on documentary film making and the people who do it. Listen here.

Recommended by Stuart Fox.


On Strategy Showcase

This podcast features marketers telling the stories behind the strategies that led to amazing work. Listen here.

Recommended by Kevin Mason (see Kevin’s BCI profile for Proctor + Stevenson here).


Uncensored CMO

Hosted by Jon Evans, this podcast “uncovers the bulls**t and carefully managed PR messages to explore the good, the bad and quite frankly downright ugly truth about marketing”. Listen here.

Recommended by Matt Ramsay (see Matt’s BCI profile for Activation here).


The Changemakers

This podcast features B2B marketers and creatives from the tech world discussing the role that creativity plays in helping them market their business. Listen here.

Recommended by Dave Corlett.


The Diary of a CEO

Hosted by entrepreneur and Dragons’ Den investor Steven Bartlett, this podcast is described as “an unfiltered journey into the remarkable stories of the people that have defined culture, achieved greatness and created stories worth studying”. Listen here.

Recommended by Alli Nicholas, membership manager at Bristol Creative Industries.


2Bobs

This podcast features conversations on the art of creative entrepreneurship. It is hosted by leading creative business experts David C. Baker and Blair Enns. Listen here.

Recommended by Alli Nicholas.

David C. Baker joined BCI for an event in February 2021 to share brilliant tips on how creative businesses can write the perfect positioning statement. Read a summary of his advice here.


Brave New Work

“Aaron Dignan and Rodney Evans help teams all over the world discover a more adaptive and human way of working. Now it’s your turn. Each week, they’ll bring you a counterintuitive take on a common challenge at work—and you’ll hear from guests who have been there and found their way to something better.” Listen here.

Recommended by Kim Slater.


Nudge

This podcast focuses on the smallest changes that can have the biggest impact. It shares simple evidence-backed tips to help you kick bad habits, get a raise, and grow a business. Listen here.

Recommended by Dr Thomas Bowden-Green.


Work Life

“Organisational psychologist Adam Grant takes you inside some truly unusual places, where they’ve figured out how to make work not suck.” Listen here.

Recommended by Chris Thurling, chair of Bristol Creative Industries following a recommendation by Ann Hiatt.


Creativity Sucks!

This podcast from Creative Review looks at what is wrong with the creative industries and how to fix it. Listen here.


Never Not Creative

This podcast, from the community for creatives to make our industry a better place, interviews creatives, mental health experts and consultants to share advice, stories and conversations. Listen here.

 

JonesMillbank, Bristol-based video production company, worked with independent marketing communications agency Golley Slater to bring its campaign for Save a Life Cymru to fruition.

It comes as data reveals that every year in Wales more than 6,000 people will have a sudden cardiac arrest and around 80% of those will happen in the home. New data shows that almost one in four of us (24%) have witnessed someone collapse and possibly need bystander CPR and defibrillation intervention.

Yet, less than half of adults in Wales are confident in performing CPR: however, when people understand that on calling 999, the call taker will talk you through CPR and direct you to the nearest registered defibrillator, 73% of adults said that they would feel more confident to intervene.

Survival rates fall by 10% every minute without CPR or by using a defibrillator, can improve a person’s chance of survival.

Golley Slater developed the campaign strategy and creative for Save a Life Cymru – Help Is Closer Than You Think – which aims to show that if you see a cardiac arrest, there is more support around you than you might realise and commissioned JonesMillbank to produce and create content across the campaign, including bilingual TV commercials, radio commercials and social adverts.

Supporting studio photography was also captured to roll the campaign out across digital, print and OOH.

“Working on the production of such a holistic campaign, let alone one for a good cause, was a fantastic opportunity and allowed us to add a huge amount of value and experience” said Russell Jones, Co-Founder at JonesMillbank.

“We already work with NHS England and a number of individual Trusts and we understand the importance of that value alongside impactful messaging”.

Dave Warfield, Creative Copywriter at Golley Slater said “the team over at JonesMillbank built a fun, creative relationship with us from the off which made treatments of scripts and finding inventive solutions enjoyable and painless.”

Lewis Clements, Senior Art Director at Golley Slater added “being so well organised on shoot days and accommodating in post-production kept the atmosphere upbeat throughout the process and made all the difference in bringing our ideas to life, exactly as we imagined them. Real patience, craft and willingness from start to finish.”

Production was shot on-location in Wales at Little Man Coffee in Cardiff and Firebug Studios in Barry.

Save a Life Cymru is Wales’ national organisation which aims to improve cardiac arrest survival rates in Wales. The Welsh Government-funded organisation promotes CPR and defibrillation within communities and encourages everyone in Wales to learn or to top up their CPR skills. 

Visit https://jonesmillbank.com/work/nhs/save-a-life-cymru to view the campaign and behind-the-scenes stills.

***

JonesMillbank are a passionate full-service video production company

They work in-house with a talented team of multi-disciplined creatives, all the while telling authentic stories long before it was cool for a range of clients such as University of Bristol, IDLES, NHS England, The Royal Mint and Battersea.

jonesmillbank.com
01173706372
hello@jonesmillbank.com

saintnicks’ Copywriter Caroline takes a deep dive into the world of AI to find out whether it’s really coming for her job.

Lately, it seems that creatives everywhere have been doing double takes as AI-powered tools start to seep into mainstream media. With DALL-E creations hot on the heels of graphic designers and free copywriting sites like Jasper looming over busy marketing teams, now’s not the time to stick our heads in the sand. Instead, we want to find out whether this new wave of computer-controlled craft is really a cause for concern – or if we can make it work in our favour.

What does creativity really mean?

First things first: When talking about AI potentially replacing us creatives, it’s worth examining what creativity really means. Albert Einstein defined it as “seeing what others see and thinking what no one else ever thought.” Many, including a lot of us here at saintnicks, are in agreement, viewing creativity as inventiveness, as our inherent ability to use imagination to originate something new. In fact, the Cambridge English Dictionary’s definition of creativity is “the ability to produce or use original and unusual ideas.” This human ingenuity is difficult to replicate – and the reason why icons like Beethoven, Maya Angelou, Matisse, the Wright brothers, or Wes Anderson are so revered.

On the contrary, others (like Steve Jobs, for example) view creativity from a more practical point of view. Jobs said, “Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something.” That implies creativity is just a skill that can be learned and developed over time using reference points as inspiration. If humans, therefore, only build on what they have learned and what others have done in order to be creative, then it’s easy to argue that AI, too, can be creative. Because that’s essentially what AI does – it takes existing information (data) and, using clever algorithms, generates fresh, new content. But we’ll get to that a bit later.

In the defence of creatives, I believe there’s more to it. Sure, creativity is original, inventive, ingenious – maybe even learned. But it’s also intentional. It’s emotional. It’s contextual. As a copywriter, for example, I’m able to write with foresight and intuition. I know that an audience is likely to prefer one tagline over another, or laugh at a certain word, or be touched by a speech, simply because I share the same human experience as the people I’m talking to. I’m sentient. I consciously want my readers to feel something, I can intend for my words to elicit a response.

As humans, our thoughts, our memories, our physical sensations and the environments that surround us play huge, important parts in our lives. It’s our creativity that enables us to make connections between these things. When we create art – and I mean art in its loosest sense here, i.e. anything that’s an expression of creativity – we are either trying to discover something about ourselves, make sense of the world, affect our audience or express our thoughts and feelings. We have an innate human desire, an urge to create something meaningful.

A machine can’t do that. It doesn’t have the capacity for free thinking, nor does it have emotional intention. It can’t look at its audience and think, “I want my art to make you laugh or cry, I want to start a discussion around this topic, I want to comment on the state of the world.” Even the smartest AI can’t independently create art with meaning.

Where art and technology intersect

So, how can AI still be a threat to creatives if it can’t have an intention? Well, let’s look at the world of visual art for a moment.

Those who recently attended Glastonbury Festival may have crossed paths with Ai-Da, an artist who created portraits of the four headlining acts during a live painting demonstration. Although ‘live’ may not be the right word for it. You see, Ai-Da is a robot. The world’s first ultra-realistic artist robot, in fact. She uses cameras in her eyes, AI algorithms and a robotic arm to draw, paint, sculpt and perform poems. For years, she’s travelled the world, displaying her artwork in galleries, talking about her experience as a humanoid artist. You can even follow her on Instagram.

While, at first glance, Ai-Da could be mistaken for something from the year 3000, the AI she uses to create her art is quite simple. Allow me to get a bit technical here. You see, there are two different types of algorithms that can be used to create images through AI. The first one is Neural Style Transfer – where AI applies the style of one image to another. The Mona Lisa recreated in the style of Kandinsky. A photograph of an avocado re-styled as Warhol’s pop art. A pencil sketch turned into a Picasso. In order to function, the Neural Style Transfer needs both images as reference points to create its final product. This is what Ai-Da does, too. Using her ‘eyes’, she receives a reference image which she then replicates in her own, pre-programmed style. To really wrap your head around it, you can think of Neural Style Transfer as a fancy Instagram filter. Still with me?

Then there’s Generative Adversarial Networks – or GAN, for short. Unlike Neural Style Transfer, GANs can create original images from scratch. Well, sort of. GANs work by predicting an outcome based on a certain prompt. Using a set of data, they generate new examples that could plausibly fit in with the original data. So if the dataset is Van Gogh’s 900 paintings, the GAN would generate a new original image that looks like it could fit into a Van Gogh collection.

The results of GAN are pretty successful. So successful in fact, that, in 2018, Christie’s became the first auction house to offer a work of art created by an algorithm – which sold for a whopping $432,500. The artists behind Edmond de Belamy, as the artwork is called, are French collective Obvious. Using a dataset of 15,000 portraits from WikiArt, painted (by humans) between the 14th and 20th century, Obvious’ GAN created a new piece of art depicting a somewhat-blurry gentleman.

DALL-E is currently not available to the public – but the concept quickly took on a viral life of its own when Boris Dayma, a machine learning engineer, created the more accessible DALL-E mini (now called craiyon). Trained on much smaller amounts of data than DALL-E, craiyon’s machine learning improves day by day based on information inputted by its millions of users. For now, the resulting images are, at best, suited to meme culture – but as these technologies develop, it’s easy to see how they could become a part of everyday professional life. Print ads, book covers, blog headers, social posts, stock imagery, web content… the possibilities are endless. So where does that leave us?

The power of the prompt

I think the answer lies within the execution. All of these technologies, from DALL-E to Jasper, rely on prompts. They require us – the humans – to do the big thinking before they can switch on and start churning out their art. And it’s within the prompt that true creativity really lies. It’s not the machine that came up with the idea to have steampunk teddies go grocery shopping, it’s the person. The prompt satisfies both our aforementioned definitions of creativity – it requires imagination, and an ability to come up with something original, but it also requires a connection to be made, as Steve Jobs said. AI is the executioner, the maker, but we are the originators, looking at things differently, thinking up unimaginable things. To find the perfect image, you need to provide the perfect prompt. If AI can’t originate, then we creatives are still needed.

How can creatives put AI to work?

Now that we’re safe in the knowledge that AI, for the time being, isn’t going to come for our jobs entirely, we might even be able to look at how it can enhance our work and make us better. As OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman described it in an interview with the New Yorker, AI can – and should – ultimately just be treated as “an extension of your own creativity.”

Concepting

In agency life, a lot of time can be wasted during the original concepting phase when all you really want to do is spit-ball ideas and get your clients’ reaction. Tools like DALL-E can be a great help to you if you’re short on time but want to present a few visuals to illustrate an idea. Even if it’s just a word on a shop front or a puppy wearing a hat. It gives a lot more power to the “What if?” when suddenly that question can be answered in minutes, rather than having to mock it all out on photoshop for hours. Plus, you’ll never have to trudge through a stock image library ever again.

Editing

One of the most remarkable features of DALL-E is its ability to make edits to an image it has already created. Want to see what a flamingo would look like inside of the pool rather than next to it? Just tell DALL-E to move it around. Boom. Little tweaks that can take up annoying amounts of time can be executed with a few verbal prompts.

Drafting

Writer’s block can be one of the most debilitating experiences for someone whose livelihood depends on how many words they can get down in an hour. AI tools like Copy.ai can act not only as a timesaver when deadlines are looming but also serve up inspiration when you’ve been staring at a blank page for far too long. Using a link, a couple of words or a simple description, Copy.ai can generate headlines for Facebook, brand mottos, meta descriptions and more. It even lets you rewrite existing text in a different tone. The output is never final-product worthy and definitely needs a human eye – and hand – to finish it off for a client, but it’s a great tool for getting that pesky first draft out of the way. Full disclosure: I actually used Copy.ai myself recently to come up with some alternatives for a Call to Action button – and it worked a treat.

So, there you have it. Whilst AI might come off as a bit of a scary, magical beast at first, it can actually serve as a handy little tool to keep our creative juices flowing. And no, I don’t think it will be replacing our creative team anytime soon. We’re far too much fun in the office.

To chat with our team or learn more about saintnicks, head to www.saintnicks.uk.com.

Some people seem to be under the impression business blogs are a little yesteryear. But don’t be fooled. Just because there isn’t the same level of hype about them when they were a brand spangly new phenomenon, doesn’t mean they’re not working away in the background earning the clever businesses that are utilising them well, excellent value for money. Business blogs are now an integral part of content strategy in mainstream marketing campaigns, so if you’re not yet writing a business blog of your own, you should be.

There are lots of reasons your business should get blogging, but here are 5 to get you started.

  1. Let people in

A well-written business blog allows you the time and space on your website to tell visitors everything you want them to know.

Writing website copy isn’t easy. You want to tell visitors everything about you so that you don’t miss a single potential lead. But here’s the rub, unless your offer is spectacularly unique for a very niche audience, you can’t speak to everyone with every word you write. Web copy needs to be short and snappy to grab attention quickly before visitors click away to another site.

That’s where a business blog can come in very handy. You can have an entire section of your website dedicated to the nitty gritty. Blogs can be populated with more information about you, your business, your customers, your opinions, and your industry.  Even if you feel you don’t have enough to say to fill a blog, believe me, you do!

And it’s not overkill because readers that land on your blog are likely looking for specific answers to a problem, or a question they have, and will select the blog most relevant to them.

A blog is your chance to share more of your personality with your audience than you ever can in a few short pages of snappy copy that make up the body of your website.

2. Offer advice, training, and tips online

Whatever the service or product you’re selling, people buy from people they trust. A well-written business blog allows you to show off your expertise to potential customers, without flooding the body of your website with words. Some companies I have worked with are nervous at first about giving too much away for free, but they soon see that by building credibility and trust online, they are encouraging more enquiries that lead to valuable and long-lasting relationships.

And no amount of words on a page will ever be the same the same as them buying your product or service. For example, home improvement companies might share some top DIY tips for the simple jobs around the home, but there will always be people that will prefer to employ someone to come and do it for them, and they’re more likely to pick up the phone to you if they have found you open and honest online. In this same example, there will also always be home improvement projects that are too big for people to take on themselves, so they will want to outsource.

3. Create a community or network

One of the best ways to generate leads is by building a network of like-minded people. When we feel like we are surrounded by similar people in a similar situation to our own, we’re more likely to engage in the conversation and act on the issues at hand. A business blog on your website that encourages people to share their views, and perhaps includes contributions from relevant third parties, can provide a safe space for everyone to share ideas, problems, and solutions. By being the creator of this network, you put your business at the center of a hub of activity. Playing on the Fear of Missing Out phenomenon, people won’t want to miss what you have to say and won’t forget the company that brought them this community.

4. Reach further than your locality

All I have known in my working life is marketing and I honestly believe in using a range of marketing tactics for best results. But different mediums have different benefits and downsides and offline techniques do have a more limited reach. For example, a feature in a trade magazine might hang around in an office of your relevant target market for a couple of months if you’re lucky but will soon be filed or recycled. An advert in your local paper might speak to just the right person when it lands, but if the need isn’t there at that moment, it will be missed and never referred to again. Online activity on the other hand is here to stay.

Blogs especially tend to be used as more of a resource for people doing research, and it doesn’t matter whether they know you or not, whether they are directly involved in your industry or not, or whether they are local to you or not. It also doesn’t matter if a particular blog post is a couple of years old – if it answers their query, it gets used.

When you think that 85% of people research online before making a purchase, you start to see the far-reaching scope for publishing more content on your website and making the most of this first step in the customer journey

5. Boost your business

Last, but certainly not least, blogs are good for business! It can be difficult to buy into blogging when the results aren’t always a direct click of a button to buy, but building your online reputation holds a lot of value. A well-written and consistently produced business blog commands interest and will generate more enquiries in the long-run. The statistics speak for themselves.

There are a whole host of benefits to having a business blog but even if you are totally sold on the idea of producing regular content for your website, it’s not always easy to do. The day to day running of the business gets in the way, and with the very best intentions, it slips down the priority list. If this sounds like you, outsourcing a copywriter to write your business blog could be a good option to allow you to have your cake and eat it!

Our latest research on Google Ads finds that almost 80% of people who recognise Adverts in a Google search refuse to click them.

 

Our latest survey has found that most people (68.2%) do not recognise a Google Ad in their search results. This means that almost a third of us DO recognise the Adverts in our search results and almost 80% of those people (78.6%) will then refuse to click on the Ads.

So what does this mean for your search marketing strategy?

Over the past six years , Varn have conducted research every six months to measure the degree to which people can recognise the Adverts within the Google Search results.

We work with our clients to hypothesise and evaluate holistic click through rates with and without the presence of a paid ads in the SERPs. Where possible we review the revenue per click generated by each channel in the context of search competition to identify the best search strategy. We are often reviewing data about click through rates on Adverts vs Organic listings, and we have always wondered who actually recognises a Google Ad when they search and what do they do then?

We all know how important advertising revenue is to Google. In 2021, Google’s ad revenue reached a staggering  $148.9 billion. Add in YouTube advertising revenue and Google Networks advertising revenue, we have a total of £208.7 billion. This amounts to 81% of Google’s total revenue so, perhaps unsurprisingly, advertising and paid search is vital to Google. But how much do people recognise it’s advertising they see when they do a Google search?

 

We have been curious about this for some time and for the last 6 years, every six months in the UK, we have conducted a survey online asking over 1000 people across all age groups:

 

“Do you know which links on the Google search results page are paid adverts?”

 

Our research has highlighted that the majority of searchers (68.2%) still do not realise it is an Advert that is appearing at the top of their Google search results.

This is good news for advertisers, as this large proportion of searchers won’t be put off by anti-advertising perceptions, before clicking on your website. However, it does pose the question that if 68.2% don’t realise they are looking at an Advert, then 31.8% do recognise they are seeing Adverts in their SERPs.

 

So what are these people doing when they notice the Ad in their SERPs?

 

Well, based on our latest findings, 25% of people do recognise it’s an Ad. They will then refuse to click on it.  Only 6.8% of the people that recognise a Google Advert will then actually go on to click.

This means that 78.6% of the people that recognise Google Adverts, refuse to click on them!

This implies there is a large chunk of your potential market deliberately choosing to ignore your advert. With an estimated 3.5 billion searches per day in the UK alone, based on our findings, 31.8% of those searches, (1.1 billion) will know that there are Ads in their search results. Of those 1.1 billion searches, almost 80% of those searchers could be actively choosing not to click on your Ad. This is a large amount of people searching and making a conscious choice to ignore your Advert, precisely because it is an Ad.

 

So what does this mean for your search plans?

Given we know these searchers will knowingly refuse to even look at your paid Ad, this means your business will need to try and engage with these people with other ‘search’ tactics. You simply can’t just throw budget at a paid media strategy alone, instead organic search will have an important role to play and a combined or hybrid search marketing strategy is needed.

From Google’s perspective they state that:

“Google’s first responsibility is to provide Search users with the most relevant possible results. If businesses were able to pay for higher rankings in the search results, users wouldn’t be getting the information they’re looking for.”

 

But let’s take a look back in time…

We examined how Google have presented Adverts to the searcher over time. Interestingly, since 2013, Google has changed it’s adverts over time to be less obvious. In the graphic below you can see how Google search Ads have evolved. The format and styling change frequently and it could be suggested that the graphic signposting of Adverts has become much more subtle over time and more in line with a standard organic listing.

When we look at our Varn research over the last 6 years, the ability to recognise an Advert hasn’t changed a great deal, even though theoretically people are getting wiser to how search engines work. It has remained between about 57% and 65% since 2017 and you can see how this may be influenced by the design of the Google Ad labelling which has since transformed to look more like regular Google listings. This year we see that figure at 68.2%, at a time when the Ad design really is very similar to an organic search listing.

Can you spot the difference…?

It really is not surprising that the majority (68.2%) of people  still don’t recognise Ads, as if you line up a paid Advert and an organic search result and see how they actually look to a searcher, you can see there is not much difference at all:

We have also seen that Ads can often take up most of the page of a search result. Combine this with the subtle design cues used to indicate the Advert status, you can see why people may not understand they are looking at just Ads rather than organic search results.

A good example is, if you search something close to our heart…. ‘SEO agency Bristol’. As you will see the paid Ads take up your whole screen when you initially search and you have to actively scroll down to get to the first organic search results. Given that 75% of people don’t scroll past page 1, those Adverts can really take up people’s attention and clicks.

Graphical user interface, application

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When we compare that back to 2009, these were the sorts of results you would see. It is really quite noticeable the the ‘Sponsored links’ are very clearly labelled.

Graphical user interface, text, application, email

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So what does this all mean for your Search Strategy?

In order to make sure your website is visible to the biggest search audience possible, it really is vital to make sure you have a search marketing strategy that embraces both SEO (organic search results) and PPC (paid search advertising).

We know from our ongoing research that the majority of the search market will not even recognise the Ad, and we can see from the examples of how Advert styling has evolved over time, why that has remained high. However, we know that we can’t ignore the large proportion of a target market who do know an Ad when they see one, especially as almost 80% of these searchers will then decide not to click. Therefore, it is critical to execute both SEO and PPC in the most optimal way possible, to ensure you are not missing out on potential clients.

Data suggests that approximately 53% of all website traffic comes from organic search and 27% from paid media,so  it really is a sensible idea to not put all your eggs in one search basket.  Neither organic nor paid search is inherently superior to each other and whilst paid ads do have a cost, you should be trying and testing both paid search and SEO, (with organic search optimisation, you’ll have to test for at least six months). By testing, reiterating and learning from both paid media and SEO, you can see what works for you and your business, short and long term, ensuring you capture all the possible clicks out there.

Given our latest research findings combined with the need to have a strategy that ensures you speak to the widest possible target search audience we have a clear recommendation. The best way to optimise reach and drive rankings and clicks, is to adopt both SEO and PPC strategies and tactics and to ensure you carefully plan and structure both for optimal results.

And Google seems to agree so we will leave the last word to them…

“Using SEO and Google Ads together may give you the best chance of bringing traffic to your site in the short term, and enhancing your business’s presence online for long-term success.”

Get in touch here to find out more about how to perfect your own hybrid model of optimised organic SEO combined with paid search media.