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 Vic.
1. More inclusive image schema
Google has announced that it’s making its image search more diverse by incorporating the Monk Skin Tone (MST) scale into its algorithm.
Brands, creators and publishers will be able to use this new schema to mark up images, and users will then be able to select images that best match their skin tone. This will be particularly important for beauty brands, who will be able to label their content with hair colour, hair texture, and skin tone.
Find out more here.
2. Adidas makes a marketing boob-boo?
I’ve never seen what the big issue is with bare boobies. But a lot of people do, which is why Adidas received an ad ban for ‘explicit nudity’ after Tweeting an image of the breasts of dozens of women of various skin colours, shapes and sizes as part of a campaign for a new sports bra range.
Adidas UK said the images were intended to ‘reflect and celebrate different shapes and sizes, illustrate diversity and demonstrate why tailored support bras were important’.
Boobs do indeed, come in all shapes and sizes, and are a completely normal part of the human body, but despite this, the pearl-clutching brigade voiced their concerns that ‘the ads could be seen by children’.
And the Advertising Standards Agency agreed, deciding that the ads were ‘likely to cause widespread offence’.
3. Google’s SEO no-no
Google launched a Digital Marketing & E-commerce certification course at the start of the month, but this week, SEOs began calling out one of the slides which talked about keyword stuffing and keyword density.
Now, filling an entire webpage with the same keyword over and over again in a small amount of copy is not a good thing, mostly from a user perspective, but there are times when if you’re writing about a specific topic that there’s no way to avoid it.
The slide in question recommended that you should ‘write more than 300 words on your webpage’ while also ‘keeping your keyword density below an industry standard of 2%’.
When this was highlighted in a Tweet from SEO Consultant, Gianluca Fiorelli, Google’s Danny Sullivan responded, stating: ‘I’m not on the team that produced that, nor are they part of the Search team. As someone from the Search team, we don’t recommend any limits or ‘density’ or anything like that. This can be ignored.’
Find out more here.
4. Trump returns to Twitter?
Twitter permanently banned Donald Trump from its platform following the Capitol riots that took place in January 2021, but Elon Musk’s takeover may see this decision reversed.
Musk has already been pretty vocal about the importance of ‘free speech’ despite the fact that he has smeared and silenced people who say anything bad about him or his business on multiple occasions.
5. A bad week for crypto bros
At the start of the week, Instagram announced it would be testing NFTs (non-fungible tokens) with a select number of creators. NFTs (digital assets that represent real-world objects like art, music, in-game items and video) are often linked with crypto, and Web 3.0 because of the blockchain technology that powers it – all of which have been hyped to heck recently.
I can’t be bothered to explain what they are, or how stupid they are, but luckily, this chap has written an excellent article that covers all three: https://webtwoboomer.com/web3-0-must-be-destroyed-57803329ee47
Every time I hear people talking about NFTs I think of this pic.twitter.com/d2THh3F6TF
— Potato Guard (@feistybunnygirl) May 11, 2022
Anyway, Tuesday saw crypto bros on Twitter having a complete meltdown as the price of major cryptocurrencies began to plummet, and that, combined with the fact that the value of those stupid monkey NFTs is dropping significantly, made me incredibly happy.
— Crypto Bros Taking Ls (@CoinersTakingLs) May 11, 2022
