I’m Feeling Lucky with Google

3 February 2012 - Digital

Have you ever wondered what the ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ button on the Google search page is for? Have you ever typed in a query and clicked on this button? Were you surprised at the result? Well, if so, this blog is here to explain just what the ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ button is all about on the Google search page.

I have read somewhere that this button may have been named in honour of Clint Eastwood’s character in Dirty Harry – “Do you feel lucky, punk? Well, do you?” I’m not too sure about that myself, so I’ll carry on.

Normally when you type a keyword or phrase into the Google search text field and click on the search button (or tap enter or return on your keyboard), Google will return a list of results on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) showing a number of websites that closely match your search query.

The ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ button does away with the search results page and takes you directly to the website that is the highest ranking site in Google for that particular keyword or phrase.

Try typing ‘number 10′ in the search input box and click the ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ button, you’ll be taken straight to the government’s Number 10 Downing Street website. If you enter ‘apple’ and click on ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’, you’ll go directly to Apple Computers official website. Try it for ‘fa’ and you’ll find yourself at the official Football Association website. Essentially, ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ is a shortcut.

Dependent on your search query, the first and highest ranking result is usually the result that you are searching for, so clicking on the ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ button will save you some time as the Search Engine Results Page will not be loaded.

The ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ button is very handy if you are confident that the highest ranking result in Google is going to be the exact page that you are looking for, but not so helpful if you know that you are going to be searching for a lot of different sites.

Using the I’m Feeling Lucky Google Button with No Search Query

Back in December 2009, pressing the ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ button without entering a query in the search input box would take you to a countdown ticker to New Year’s Day. By doing the same thing today, you are taken to the Google Doodles page, where you can browse the different alternative logos that have featured on the Google search pages over the years.

The I’m Feeling Lucky Google Button in Other Google Tools

The Google Toolbar has the ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ feature included and this works in the same way as on the regular Google search page. Picasa also has an ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ button, but in this instance, clicking the button applies adjustments and enhancement filters to the images.

Using the I’m Feeling Lucky Google Button with Google Instant

If your browser is set to Google Instant, the ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ button will disappear as soon as you start entering a search query. Fortunately, you can still use the ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ feature even with Google Instant enabled by hovering your cursor over the list of predictions in the text input field. An ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ link will appear to the right of the prediction. If you are feeling particularly efficient, you can navigate this feature by using your arrow keys. Press the down arrow to scroll through the suggestions, and then tap the right arrow if you’re feeling lucky.

So, the next time you perform a search using Google, experiment a little with the ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ button, you may be surprised at what you find.

If you would like to find out more about Google and the most effective way to promote your corporate website in their search engine, please do not hesitate to contact us, we will be very happy to answer your questions.

Better briefs breed bigger ideas

30 January 2012 - Advertising

I’ve had some briefs in my time, let me tell you. Big ones, small ones, long ones, short ones, 10-hour ones, 2-minute ones, 5000-word ones, 5-word ones, chapter and verse ones, barely even verbalised ones.

The brief is in many ways, of course, the start of the cycle. The first step on the creative journey towards the big idea and, as such, is absolutely critical to the whole process.

Give a good brief and you’re instantly upping your chances of the agency coming up with a great idea.

And yet, in my experience, it can be an area that’s often overlooked, often given scant regard.

Now I know it’s always going to be horses for courses when briefing. The level of detail and the amount of preparation the client or account handler goes into will, of course, depend upon the type of job involved. Not to mention your own familiarity with the client as a creative. If, say, you’re coming up with a small support ad that’s going to take you 20 minutes, you don’t want a four-hour brief. Similarly, if it’s an existing client, you might not want nor necessarily need a blow-by-blow account of their every marketplace innovation in the last 100 years.

But, if we’re talking about a new creative campaign for a new or relatively new client, here would be my tips to help you forge a mutually productive and beneficial relationship with your creative resource – my advice to help you end up with the best possible creative result:

1. Don’t be lazy

Don’t dodge the difficult. Don’t hide from hard work. Few things in life are liable to irritate the art director/writer team more than having account handlers or clients email messages where they’re asked to scroll down through umpteen internal email discussions in order to eke out the valuable snippets of information they need to help them embark on the project.

Trust me, ‘See below’ are two words guaranteed to set off a small fit of creative pique. That and ‘Check links’.

So, don’t take short cuts. Don’t ask people to do your hard work for you.

At the very least, especially if you’re on the agency side, it’s being terrifically lazy. After all, unless you’re intimately acquainted with the product or service, unless you pass on those nuggets you’ve picked up, unless you show yourself that level of understanding and knowledge you’re trying to engender in your creatives, how on earth can you expect to get the desired results?

2. Don’t be a cliché

You come across some fairly weird characters in advertising agencies. We can be an eclectic bunch.

Many, many moons ago, HROC used to have an account director whose entire brief consisted solely of:

‘It needs to stand out and grab attention.’

It didn’t matter who the client was. Didn’t matter what product or service they were selling. Didn’t matter which media it was. Didn’t matter who we were supposed to be talking to. The instructions to the creatives were always the same:

‘Make it stand out. Make it grab attention.’

This came as something of a surprise to the creatives. Naturally, we were under the impression our job was to make the idea as dull and ordinary and insipid as possible. We assumed our key objective was for the creative execution to create minimum impact, garner minimum attention, achieve minimum standout.

What the account director in question failed to understand, of course, is that, when someone’s words and mantras are stuck on endless repeat, their meaning diminishes and what they’re saying becomes a kind of fuzzy background noise. Ignored by everyone.

There was another former account handler (okay, you got me, it might have been the same one) whose default setting brochure brief comprised just four words. Whatever the client, you could be pretty much sure that the brochure in question needed to be:

‘Clean, fresh, modern, contemporary.’

Oh please.

So, don’t lapse into old overdone advertising chestnuts. Don’t lumber your creatives with inane marketing platitudes. If you want the best, well-thought out creative solutions, give them a well-thought out brief. If you want a creative idea that prods and probes and pokes, then the brief you’re writing should attempt to do the same, too.

3. Do look for the compelling insight

Advertising probably used to be a whole lot easier back in the old days.

Back then, you had USPs – unique selling propositions. Something new and different your client could lay claim to.

Nowadays, USPs, absolutely bona fide USPs, are much more difficult to come by. It’s a way, way more competitive world out there. Nowadays, more often than not, you have to dig a whole lot deeper to find that special something about the product or service you’re advertising.

Here at HROC, we don’t look for USPs anymore – not unless they’re staring us right in the face.

We look for the compelling insight instead.

Okay, it’s probably just a more highfalutin and more sophisticated way of saying USP – in fact, ask the HROC Planning Director, and he’ll blur the lines further still by telling you the compelling insight is the attempt to differentiate the client in order to gain a business advantage.

Swopping marketing speak for creative cat speak, I guess we’d describe it as an attempt to identify the quintessential truth of a brief – to get to the kernel, the very crux, of the message the client’s trying to convey.

Give the creative team a focal point. Give them something to go after. This isn’t asking you to do their job and come up with the idea for them, but there’s no harm in tossing out a possible angle – an approach that warrants consideration. An avenue to explore.

Yes, of course, a brief needs all those other ‘givens’. The mandatories, the Instructions on guidelines, the deadlines, the budget, how big the logo’s got to be, so on and so forth. But, if your brief lacks a compelling insight, I’d suggest you keep it away from the creative department until it does.

If you’d like to brief HROC on coming up with a big marketing idea, we’d be delighted to hear from you.

Any time, any place, anywhere.

25 January 2012 - Advertising

To paraphrase an old Tottenham Hotspur legend, back in the days when ‘Saint and Greavsie’ was absolutely de rigueur of a Saturday lunchtime for any self respecting football fan, advertising is a ‘funny old game’.

Leastways, it can be for the creative.

Especially when you’re talking about the creative process, that often weary, always inexorable journey towards the ‘big idea’.

Anyone who’s ever set out on that particular mission on a regular basis will be familiar with how it goes. Basically, you stare at a big, blank, white layout pad, chunky black marker pen poised at the ready, for hours on end, hoping against hope that some big fat juicy, brief-answering, potentially award winning idea is going to somehow magically and spontaneously pop into your head from nowhere.

Then the hours turn into days. The days can and often do turn into weeks.

And, despite spending what seems like an eternity endlessly pinballing things around your head, despite mentally screwing yourself up into the tightest of stress-filled balls exploring and re-exploring potential creative routes, your layout pad is still the same as it was at the start of the journey.

Big, blank, white.

Untroubled by even the slightest scribble. Undisturbed by anything that looks remotely workable or developable.

In the meantime, of course, you distract yourself, seeking inspiration everywhere, eking out creative stimulation in everything.

You absorb every piece of the client’s sales literature, devour every PowerPoint, pore relentlessly over every last syllable on the website, becoming, to all intents and purposes, a part time expert on them, on their sector, on their competitors.

Still nothing.

You go out to their headquarters, visit the factory, meet the people, imbibe their culture – getting to know them, getting to know all about them (I used to be intimately acquainted with most, if not all, of the 200 individual operations required to handcraft a single pair of boots for a shoe manufacturing client).

Still nothing.

You spend the thick end of two weeks turning yourself into the equivalent of some kind of advertising creative monk. Getting up at a ridiculously early hour, going to bed late, forgetting to eat in-between – surviving on a diet of thick, black, treacle-like coffee, the kind your spoon stands up in. Your kids start to ask their mother who that monosyllabic zombie is with the rigid stare and sunken eyes, and what has he done with their father.

You change tack, your approach, your routines, even try to change the scenery – a former HROC creative guru always insisted that my art director and I, when bereft of creative inspiration, should go and sit in a boat in the middle of a lake (I think it was a symbolic thing, not to be taken literally).

Still nothing.

And then, just when you think your brain has been squeezed dry of every last drop of creative juice, just when you’ve had your fill of going over and over possible creative routes you dismissed days before as weak and clichéd and hackneyed, just when you are absolutely at the end of your tether and seriously entertaining alternative career options…

… it happens.

An idea appears. Materialises out of nothing.

It’s akin to electricity. Something, a thought process, going into a kind of instantaneous electrical loop. Something previously intangible joining up. One part of the brain connecting with another connecting with another connecting with another. All your ducks suddenly lining up into a nice, neat neural sequential row.

And, even before the idea’s properly come together, even before it’s really taken shape, you’re already picking it up, running with it, probing and prodding it, pushing back the boundaries of its potential further and further, as you realise the idea isn’t just good, it also has ‘legs’.

And you know. In an instant, you know. You’ve done it. You’ve cracked it.

You can’t legislate when or where or what or how. You simply can’t. This is why there is such strong advertising folklore about ideas being scribbled down on the back of the proverbial fag packet – because, chances are, the eureka moment came to you while you were staring down into a urinal.

No matter how much you delve or post-analyse, you will never understand what the trigger was. As you stand there bathing in the warm afterglow of the knowledge that you’ve pulled it out of the bag, you won’t be able to pinpoint the catalyst. All you’ll know is that you probably had to go through all those days and weeks of mad desperate agonising and creative barrenness to get you to where you are now.

And you’ll probably feel it was worth it.

If you’d like HROC to go on a creative journey for you, we’d be delighted to hear from you.

Google V’s Twitter – Battle of the big guns

16 January 2012 - Digital

Google V’s Twitter – Battle of the big guns

The battle between Google and Twitter appears to be getting bigger and bigger with what seems to be a good old fashioned slanging match currently taking place, and in my eyes there can only be one winner.

For those that don’t know, Google launched its Google+ (Plus) service in June 2011 after the demise of Google Buzz. Google+ generated a big buzz (pardon the pun) amongst techies and search engine experts alike as a sort of grown-up and professional version of Facebook with bits of LinkedIn, Twitter and other social platforms thrown in for good measure. The fanfare that its launch produced was pretty impressive in the early months due to its perceived exclusivity making it like that new toy or gadget that you have got to get your hands on. As such the number of sign-ups was massive when it was rolled out further to anyone over 18.

Last month the number of users surpassed 62 million, at that growth rate the number of users will hit around 400 million by the end of the year!! This won’t be the case though, the huge number of Google+ sign-ups in the early months was out of curiosity and when you actually get in to the nitty-gritty of what Google+ has to offer you, for want of better words, it’s pretty rubbish. It has a few cool features and potential but the problem is – everyone you know is already on Facebook and most of those are also on Twitter and this fulfils most people’s social needs at the moment. Is there actually room in Average-Joe’s busy day to browse a whole different Social Media platform? Most people I know signed up and since then have rarely looked at it. On a personal note, compared to Facebook and Twitter I find Google+ dull (but that may just be me).

Google clearly feel strongly about the potential of Google+, far more so than it did about Buzz and with a base of 62 million people already, it is unlikely to go away. They are going to continue to push, promote and improve it as heavily as they can, and that’s where Twitter seem to be getting their knickers in a twist and doing a lot of whingeing in the press.

Google have announced that they are making changes to its results in order to integrate Google+ in to it. Calling it ‘Search plus Your World’, it will push results from Google+ up the rankings and really put it in the faces of users. This will only apply to users signed in to their Google accounts and will fire back far more personal and tailored search results related to the information Google knows about you, your friends and your acquaintances. It sounds like a big change but until it’s fully rolled out nobody really knows how much of a difference it will actually make.

Twitter is making a big deal of it though, with their lawyer and ex-Google employee Alex Macgillivray labelling it a “bad day for the internet”.

Twitter expanded further with an official statement including “For years, people have relied on Google to deliver the most relevant results any time they wanted to find something on the internet.We’re concerned that as a result of Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone. We think that’s bad for people, publishers, news organisations and Twitter users.”

All sounds very right-on but would Twitter be kicking up a stink if their Tweets dominated the top of the search results for every Google search imaginable? Would this provide a good search experience for Google users? I think the answer to both of these questions is “no”.

At the end of the day, Google is just a website and just a business like any other, it just happens to have grown astronomically to the point where almost everybody on the internet in the world uses it and thinks of it first when they want to find something. Off the back of Google millionaires are made across the globe and that’s why any changes they make are scrutinised so thoroughly by anyone who thinks it may affect them negatively. Google is not a regulating body, it is a website, if they want to promote their own product (Google+) ahead of somebody else’s (Twitter) then surely they are entitled to do so.

My money’s on Google in this current battle. If you don’t like Google or are unhappy with it then the answer is simple – don’t use it. It isn’t compulsory and as the owners, they can do what they want with it. Maybe Twitter should remember that in a world where search and social media are becoming more and more entwined.

For more information on Google’s changes or to discuss any aspects of social media, don’t hesitate to get in touch.

I could cry when I see some advertising nowadays…

13 January 2012 - Advertising

What do the film ‘A Night to Remember’, Armistead Maupin’s ‘Maybe the Moon’, Cilla Black’s ‘Surprise, Surprise’, Ty Pennington’s ‘Extreme Makeover: Home Edition’, Port Vale FC, my children and the John Lewis’s Christmas commercial all have in common?

I’ll tell you. They’ve all reduced me to tears.

Actually, Port Vale FC and my children do that to me on a virtual weekly, if not daily, basis.

Back to that John Lewis’s commercial though. If you’re of that kind of emotionally overwrought disposition, prone to lapsing into sentimentality, you can sort of expect that tearful outcome with films, books and TV programmes, things that have deliberately set out to tug away at the heartstrings.

But a TV commercial? I mean, really? Duh?

I know I’m the kind to break down at the first hint of a reunion involving long lost relatives, I know I’m turned into to a whimpering incoherent mush by anything involving a child and serious illness, but I have to say blubbering my eyes out over a TV advert was a definite first for me. And anecdotal evidence would seem to support the notion that I wasn’t the only one.

Now the decorations have been taken down, that disaster of a sweater your mother bought you has been returned to the shop from whence it came, and that big fat ridiculous inflatable Santa has finally been taken off the roof, I thought it would be worth taking a look at what all the furore was about.

And furore it undoubtedly was.

After all, how could a mere TV commercial entrench itself so firmly in the consciousness of the public? How could you find it the central topic of conversation at virtually every Christmas social you attended (perhaps I just get invited to really dull do’s). How could it have so quickly spawned a surfeit of spoofs – a sure sign if ever there was one of its status and penetration into the public perception.

I guess there are a few reasons.

In itself, it was a brilliant, immaculately conceived and crafted piece of drama. Forget the fact it was advertising something. It was simply a faultless piece of story-telling with every scene and vignette beautifully weaved together to retain interest and attention. A compulsive repeating drama you had to watch again and again because, like the very best films, you had to make sure you hadn’t missed anything relevant the first time.

And, of course, it was relevant. Boy, was it relevant, seamlessly, inconspicuously, filling up the commercial with actual products sold by the actual advertiser that viewers might end up actually buying in one of their actual stores. In an age where something as simple as portraying typical products and typical customers has seemingly become a forgotten art, when the world’s largest primate playing drums is deemed the best way to sell chocolate, wasn’t it refreshing to see a piece of advertising that presented its wares so cleanly and honestly. Wasn’t it a nice change to see substance winning over style? And especially at Christmas.

Maybe it was the fact that there was a twist. A delicious delightful twist that, the first time around, I swear I never saw coming – and which, despite repeated viewings, still surprised me time and time and time again.

Maybe it was the unforgettably haunting soundtrack, a cover of a Smiths song that has in turn stirred up its own minor controversy, with fans of the band accusing Morrissey, the ultimate anti establishmentarian figure, and Marr of selling out to the middle classes.

Maybe it was the fact that, irrespective of what particular chaos reigned in our own living room, whenever the commercial aired you could be pretty much assured that, by the final frame, all occupants – parent and child alike – were held in a kind of rapt appreciative silence.

Maybe it was all down to timing. Maybe, in a world that seems increasingly dehumanised, after a year where the cities have burned and shop windows have shattered, we all welcomed a bit of sentiment into our lives, no matter how sickly, sweet or cloying. We all needed to rediscover that simple emotional warmth and innocence again.

Or maybe it was the fact that – for the first time in a very long time – I found myself, as a creative in an advertising agency, staring at a TV commercial and thinking: ‘Wow, I’d wish I’d done that.’ Hand on heart, it made me want to take one hand out of the mixed nuts bowl and the other out of the ‘Celebrations’ box and, instead, head for the HROC studio to whip out my A3 layout pad and big thick N60 marker, like days of yore.

But, most of all, it was probably because the ad made me want to act in a certain way. Why, it was all I could do to stop myself from hopping in the car and heading out in search of the nearest Lewis’s store – this from someone who has never felt a particular affiliation with or connection to the shop. I found myself affected, influenced, persuaded. And, at the end of the day, isn’t that what we – as advertising agents – are supposed to be trying to do?