Five things worth sharing from the last week or so, brought to you by a different member of the Browser Media team every Friday.
This week’s My Five is by Joe.
1. You met Graham? Now meet Grant
Did you see the Graham campaign last year? It was excellent and attracted a lot of very justified attention and acclaim.
There is a new kid on the block – head over to AdAge and meet Grant, a human with a body specifically designed to endure the rigours of a career in advertising. Extremely amusing and, in my humble opinion, well executed.
I am always a fan of anyone prepared to have a laugh at their own expense and this is a good example of just that. Hats off to whichever advertising agency bod decided to declare that they don’t listen to anyone, is an alcoholic, has a chip on their shoulder, is spineless and not very well endowed…
2. Really?
If you were in London this week, did you see this amazing ad?
Client: “Listen we want results, we don’t care how. We’re not going to hold you back or argue, you’re the expert so we’ll trust your direction.”
Copywriter: “…okay.” pic.twitter.com/JX1h3eUJ9r
— BARRY (@ClareBarry) October 17, 2018
WOW – buy that copywriter a beer!
I am afraid that it is a case of ‘not really’ as it was just a photoshopped ad and it doesn’t actually exist. All fiction, although I reckon you can probably find a pint for £8 at some places in Cornwall?
Very good coverage nonetheless on my digital travels during the week, so mission accomplished for Visit Cornwall.
3. How long does SEO take?
If only I had a penny for every time someone asked me how long SEO takes…
The true answer to this (very) often asked question is that it will vary. Some on-page SEO changes produce almost immediate effects but you can sometimes feel as though Google is ignoring all the SEO love that you are pouring into your site, with months going by before you can see the impact of improvements that you make.
The difference boils down to how frequently the search engine spiders crawl your site. It will vary from page to page on any given site, so it becomes very difficult to know how long you need to wait until the spiders are back.
It was interesting to see Google’s John Mueller discuss the issue this week in a webmaster hangout. Answering a question about how long it takes for a page to be removed from Google’s index after adding noindex and nofollow tags, John explained how crawl rates vary from page to page, with some pages only being crawled a couple of times per year.
He suggests using site maps to speed up crawls on recently modified pages, but didn’t mention using the Google URL inspection tool, which I have seen help speed things up and is definitely worth a try if you are struggling with a particular page.
4. The worst video ever?
As discussed in point 1 above, I love a good parody video.
A certain Stevie Buckley obviously shares my appreciation of a decent parody video, but managed to create a bit of a stir this week by highlighting a video that turned out not to be a parody:
https://twitter.com/StevieBuckley/status/1051762443851112448
Absolutely incredible. Possibly the most cringe inducing piece of video content that I have ever seen!
Head over to https://thetab.com/uk/2018/10/16/do-you-want-to-work-in-recruitment-because-this-is-the-lad-hellscape-that-awaits-you-84092 for a good dissection of the ad in all its miserable glory.
5. And finally…
A nice story doing the rounds this week on the BBC News (although it is an older story):
Were you watching it, waiting for “….and then Leo the lion cub grew a bit bigger and ate all the puppies for breakfast”? Don’t worry, we only do happy stories on My Five!
Have a great weekend.
