Mystique-al Blue Burgers

Let’s start with the Australian food chain Ribs & Burgers, which celebrated the release of X-men: Apocalypse in Blu-ray by creating a blue bun burger. The not so far-fetched idea comes from the mutants Mystique and Nightcrawler (although the fact it is Blu-ray may have also helped).

Just try to forget how much colorant they used in order to make the perfect, bright blue bun and dig into the triple chilli chicken and blue cheese goodness.

Sausage Hotline, how may I help you?

As weird as this may sound, this is the greeting you will come across if you are ever wondering how to cook your sausages. The American company Johnsonville – that can be reached at (844) 9-SAUSAGE – will give you innovative cooking tips (involving sausages, obviously).

I would add more but I’d rather let you watch for yourself.

Sweet tooth on a bus

We’ve been waiting for this for a long time and Cadbury’s have made it a reality. The Double Decker Bus is opening its doors to students all over the UK for a tasting experience.

Once the lucky visitors have hopped on to celebrate the 40^th anniversary of the brand, they will be challenged to a series of mini obstacles on the top deck, before indulging in Emoji Cookies and Avocado Rocky Roads. Sounds like our kind of bus!

Like me, like my addiction

A serious campaign for a serious topic, alcoholism.

French agency Addict ‘Aide pulled out a month-long stunt on Instagram: they created Louise Delage, a young woman of 25 living in Paris and posting pictures of herself and her days and nights out.

They let the truth out a few weeks ago and managed to raise awareness on the topic. A few of the followers spotted something dodgy about it but Addict ‘Aide were expecting more. We love it when social media goes above and beyond for a good cause and especially when it crosses borders.

A profile among others. Nothing suspicious until you realise that on every photograph, you can see an alcoholic drink.

Thinking

A photo posted by Louise Delage (@louise.delage) on Sep 21, 2016 at 3:34pm PDT

They revealed the subtle campaign a few weeks ago and in doing so sucessfully raised awareness on the topic of alcoholism.

Although a few of the account’s followers had spotted something dodgy, it was a much smaller number than Addict ‘Aide were expecting. A really interesting use of social media to raise awareness of a controversial topic.

Just goes to show, you should be careful of what you like next time…

Sun’s out, horses out

This week saw Texas come to London in a clever stunt to promote the new film Magnificent Seven.

To promote the remake of western movie, seven cowboys were set loose in the capital this week. If you live in London then you might just have been lucky enough to have crossed paths with a cowboy on your way to work.

Whilst many of the delegates came from afar, a large number of attendees, speakers and sponsors were from Leeds and the surrounding areas. Ultimately, what SearchLeeds showed us, was that there really is a demand for Digital events within Leeds, as we saw 400 event tickets reserved within just 48 short hours.

So, following on from SearchLeeds, and in order to keep try and keep up the momentum of the conference ahead of SearchLeeds 2017 (currently in planning stages), we decided to start running Digital Horizons.

These events are designed to offer an evening of expert insight on a variety of topics across Search and digital as a whole. Free to attend, the first of these events is taking place on Wednesday 5th October at Lamberts Yard.

Event Agenda

18.00 – 18.30: Registration

18.40 – 19.05: Steve Kenwright, Director of Search – Branded3 –

Title: Second Screen Search

Stephen is director of search at St. Ives Group-owned Branded3 – the best large SEO agency in Europe according to the 2016 judges of the EU Search Awards – and is responsible for owned media, including search, content and analytics.

Writing weekly for the Drum Magazine, Stephen has presented at more than 100 industry events since joining B3 in 2012 and now organises the SearchLeeds conference, hosting hundreds of marketers from around Europe every year.

19.05-19.30: Laura Hogan, Head of Search – Ricemedia

Title: Want to beat your competitors? Learn from them!

Laura Hogan is Head of Search at Ricemedia. She has over five years in the industry, both in-house and agency side. Fresh from speaking at Brighton SEO in September. Still traumatised by the recent Great British Bake Off news.

Ricemedia are a Search and Social Digital Marketing Agency that prides itself on delivering tangible results for clients across SEO, PPC, Social Media, Digital PR and Content.

19.30 – 19.55: Meghan Burton, Director of SEO – Epiphany

Title: Dominating the Long Tail

Meghan Burton is Director of SEO at Epiphany responsible for not only developing their approach to SEO but also for a whole bunch of incredibly smart, innovative SEOs in a team of 17 based in Leeds.

Epiphany pride ourselves on our forward-thinking, user-focused approach to SEO, with in-house abilities to create incredible campaigns alongside skills in technical SEO and content strategy. We also provide paid search, display, CRO, and web development for an array of fantastic clients.

19.55 – 20.30: Networking Drinks/Pizza

Following the presentations all delegates are invited to stay for networking, where we’ll be putting on some drinks and pizzas, kindly sponsored by MetMarketing.

If you would like to register, then please click here.

For future speaking or sponsorship opportunities for Digital Horizons please send an email to me; charlotte.harris@branded3.com

Google’s Gary Illyes has confirmed that Penguin is now part of Google’s core algorithm in a post on the Official Google Webmaster Central blog.

This is the first time Google has updated the algorithm since Penguin 3.0 in October 2014.

The algorithm is “now more granular,” meaning that affected sites will disappear for certain keywords (or have certain pages disappear – we’ll have to wait and see which) rather than the whole website falling off the face of the earth, like this:

Penguin is now real-time. Illyes says

Historically, the list of sites affected by Penguin was periodically refreshed at the same time. Once a webmaster considerably improved their site and its presence on the internet, many of Google’s algorithms would take that into consideration very fast, but others, like Penguin, needed to be refreshed. With this change, Penguin’s data is refreshed in real time, so changes will be visible much faster, typically taking effect shortly after we recrawl and reindex a page. It also means we’re not going to comment on future refreshes.

This means several things.

Pretty much everyone should see some kind of recovery

Brands tend to “over-optimise” for certain keywords, which is likely what caused them to be affected by Penguin in the first place. This tends to refer to lots of anchor text links, especially links pointing to internal “commercial” pages – loads of “car insurance” anchor text to your /car-insurance page, for example.

Previous iterations of Penguin would effectively trash your whole website. This “more granular” version is likely to let other pages that don’t display the same spam signals return (your /life-insurance page, perhaps).

You can also probably recover a keyword by 404ing an affected page and putting a new one up without redirects. I’ll be testing that this week and will update as soon as we have results because…

It’s going to be weeks before we see the full impact

Let’s assume that core-algorithm Penguin runs in the same way as core-algorithm Panda, which seems to roll out every two weeks and take the full two weeks to roll out.

Those waiting to recover from Penguin shouldn’t get too disappointed if nothing has happened by Monday. It’ll probably be the first week of October before the dust starts to settle and we know who’s been affected and who’s recovered.

We’ll never hear about Penguin again

Google won’t mention Penguin again, except to deny its existence (although this update will give some SEOs a year’s worth of conference material).

@mihaiaperghis yes, which also means we’ll stop talking about it (or I will anyway) @rustybrick

— Gary Illyes (@methode) January 19, 2016

In future, the pattern will be as follows:

1. Some sites won’t recover right now – because their owners haven’t put in the necessary work, perhaps – or some sites will be hit in future. It’ll be a few years before there are no sites left waiting for a Penguin recovery.
2. SEOs will be monitoring the traffic of these sites (and rankings for as long as Google continues to let us), see a massive spike that could only mean a Penguin recovery, and head straight to the forums/Twitter.
3. Google will deny a Penguin update within a few days.
4. Several weeks later Google will reluctantly admit to updating the “core algorithm” – which Penguin is now part of.

Since Panda was baked into the core algorithm in January there have been several obvious algorithm changes (including in January itself) that saw big changes for sites affected by that algorithm.

I’m assuming that “baking” an algorithm into the core, apart from sounding delicious, effectively means replacing the previous algorithm with new infrastructure. I assume that Hummingbird replaced Caffeine in roughly the same way – it’s a newer, better way of doing roughly the same thing.

In the coming months we’re going to see days when an update has obviously taken place and certain sites previously affected by Penguin recover together – followed by an announcement that a core algorithm update has taken place.

This will signal what we used to call a Penguin “update”.

But we should never have to wait for a “refresh” again.

Further reading:

• Dr. Pete has already posted some great analysis of the run-up to the current update (including that recent “core update” which looked a whole lot like Penguin).
• Martin Woods posted some early thoughts on the update which I largely agree with (including contributions from Andrew Girdwood and Gerry White).

But first, we have to acknowledge what a great week it’s been in the world of PR. Packed to the brim with innovative and unique ideas – let us share our favourites with you. Enjoy!

The Real Junk Food Project – Food waste supermarket

The UK’s first food waste supermarket has now opened in Pudsey…which isn’t too far away from our Leeds office!

The supermarket is the latest creation from the food waste campaigners The Real Junk Food Project, who are renowned for their food waste cafés around the world. The store stocks surplus food that was on its way to the bin, and all produce is priced on a ‘pay as you feel’ basis.

Amazingly, the supermarket receives on average between two and ten tonnes of food at its warehouse every day!

Qantas – Out of Office Travelogue

Qantas airlines have come up with a fantastic way to spruce up your (typically very dull) out-of-office replies. You can now turn your message into a travel diary of your Instagram photos.

If you want to make your colleagues even more jealous about the fact that you’re on holiday, then check out how it works in the video below:

Desigual brings Snapchat filters to life

Recently, we’ve seen an increase in brands experimenting with Snapchat and their sponsored lenses offering.

However, at New York Fashion Week, we saw clothing brand Desigual take a different approach to utilising Snapchat.

They brought Snapchat filters to life…on the runway!

From paper versions of the ‘flower crown filter’, to the classic ‘dog filter’ expertly created through the power of makeup, it’s such a simple, yet effective idea.

Spanish label @desigual sends out models at their #NYFW runway show wearing Snapchat filters. #SoCool! pic.twitter.com/zzg6IlvDFb

— t2 (@t2telegraph) September 12, 2016

Land O’Lakes – Delete to Feed

#FoodPorn, #InstaFood and #Foodie are just a few examples of the food related hashtags that we see on Instagram when users are sharing food photos. But, after hitting the upload button, do these food-photo-sharing users ever stop to think about those who go hungry every day?

With this in mind, American based agricultural cooperative, Land O’Lakes, created the Delete to Feed campaign, aiming to help Feeding America erase hunger, one Instagram photo at a time.

Any #InstaFoodie can take part in the challenge – all you have to do is delete one food photo from your Instagram account and Land O’Lakes will donate 11 meals to those in need. You can find all the relevant information to take part on this website.

Shhhhh! TodayTix – Silent Snacks

Could this be the end of slurping and loud crunching at the cinemas and theatres? TodayTix, a mobile-app for theatre tickets, have created a silent snack range, which they exclusively trialled at certain shows at London theatres.

Whether this is simply a clever PR stunt, or an actual attempt to banish all those terribly annoying cinema snacks, it’s a really playful idea and has received some great coverage so far!

To celebrate Roald Dahl’s 100^th Birthday yesterday, supermarket Morrison’s have come up with the genius (and so simple) idea to sell the BFG’s infamous Snozzcumbers.

Fans of the book and film will remember that the Snozzcumbers are a fruit that very much resembled (you guessed it), a cucumber.

Rebecca Burns, Morrison’s chief cucumber buyer explains, “We’re bringing a bit of the magic of Roald Dahl’s story into our stores and celebrating this humble cucumber in all its knobbly, wonky glory. Unlike Snozzcumbers, children will find this variety delicious – not a hint of cockroaches or slime wanglers.

The snozzcumbers cost 41p each and a donation will be made to Roald Dahl’s Marvellous Children’s Charity for every one sold.

If you’re not partial to a Snozzcumber, we’ve also spotted Rococo’s range of Roald Dahl chocolate bars which include Bean’s Cider Milk and Bruce Bogtrotter’s Chocolate Fudge Cake. But hurry, James’ Scrumptious Peach is already sold out!

Walkers’ crisp sarnie club

I’m not going to lie, a few too many of the new sandwich flavour Walkers crisps have been sampled in the office over the last couple of weeks.

So when we heard that Walkers were opening a speak easy style crisp sarnie club in London, it’s safe to say we were a tad jealous. *

Hidden behind a movable crisp shelf in a newsagent in London Bridge, the club allows crisp sarnie connoisseurs to build their own sandwich from a variety of breads, fillings, limited edition crisps and sauces.

The sarnie club will be hidden within Chris Peter’s News store on Tooley Street until Sep 24^th. Make sure you get your ticket here.

*So jealous in fact, we’ve opened our own ‘not so secret’ B3 crisp sarnie club in the office this Friday, no ticket required!

Clapham common’s cat takeover

If you’ve ventured anywhere near the south London tube station this week, you may have noticed that there has been an infestation of furry felines.

After launching in April, the aptly named Citizens Advertising Takeover Service (or CATS for short) has raised thousands of pounds on a crowd-funding website – the aim? To give London commuters a well-earned break from the constant advertising on the underground and replace all 68 adverts with posters of cats!

However, what we love the most about this campaign is that all the cats featured are strays from Battersea and Cats Protection, as well as one poster starring members of the publics’ cats who each donated £100 to make their pets famous. One proud owner even travelled from the US to see his cats modelling debut.

Ikea’s rainy day special

Some customers have already called Ikea out for a ‘cheap’ marketing ploy…but we say it’s genius!

Shoppers have noticed that Ikea changes the price of its umbrellas when it’s raining outside. The Swedish furniture store appears to do us all a favour when an unexpected downpour strikes and lower the price of its Grossby umbrellas.

Unfortunately, the above image posted on Reddit suggests this ‘rainy day special’ is only available in the US so it’s a pretty good job we’re in for the hottest September in 67 years!

Be aware that one of the requirements of HTTP/2 is that your site must be on HTTPS (TLS over HTTP). Chances are that if you are not on HTTPS, you are not on version 2.0 of the new protocol. To read more on what the requirements of HTTP/2, I recommend reading this post by Rachel Andrew from Smashing Magazine.

The Google Chrome Developer Tool

If you are still not opening the Chrome Developer Toolkit then I suggest that you start integrating it into your SEO and web analysis. I would read 10 Chrome Dev Tool Hacks by James Porter at Distilled and My Favourite SEO Tool Isn’t An SEO Tool by AJ KOHN to see the benefits of using this tool. I cannot stress enough how awesome it is (and it’s free!).

To check your site using the Developer tool, you will need to add the protocol column to the Network tab. To do this, open the Developer toolkit by hitting F12 or right clicking and inspect element in Chrome. Then navigate to the Network tab and right click on one of the headings, then click protocol in the drop down menu.

This will add a new protocol column to the Network tab and let you know which HTTP protocol version each resource (HTML, CSS, JS, font, etc.) is being served on.

From there you will be able to identify if any of your own internal resources are being served over HTTP/2. As you can see from the screenshot above, https://www.branded3.com/ is on HTTP/2, but some of the CSS and JS files from Google are still on SPDY.

Browser Extensions

If you prefer a quicker alternative, then there is one notable browser extension for checking HTTP/2.0. The HTTP/2 and SPDY Indicator extension for chrome adds a lightning bolt to your browser and changes colour to let you know if there is SPDY or HTTP/2. There is an extension for Firefox as well, if you don’t like using Chrome.

If a blue lightning bolt appears when a page is loaded, the webpage was served using HTTP/2.

A red lightning bolt indicates that the webpage was served using SPDY.

A grey lightning bolt indicates that the webpage was served using neither SPDY or HTTP/2.

Online Tool

If you can’t use Chrome Developer tools or add extensions to your browser, then you can check using a HTTP/2 online testing tool from keycdn.com.

Further Reading on HTTP/2

If you feel like you want to read up more on HTTP/2, the below sites will help:

1. For more information on what HTTP/2 is, I suggest heading over to the High Performance Browser Network
2. A community of developers at GitHub have created a comprehensive list of tools for analysing and debugging HTTP/2
3. Visit the FAQ pages on the HTTP/2 micro site on GitHub for further reading

Bar Luca, Sydney- Willy Wonka Tribute

In honour of Gene Wilder’s recent passing, Bar Luca, a restaurant in Sydney, has created a rainbow burger as a fitting tribute.

The Beauregard Burger is a creation inspired by Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, put together by the imaginative folks at Bar Luca. Inside the burger is beef, tomato soup jelly and popping candy cheese. It certainly is one heck of an interesting meal.

We think this it’s a great way to honour Gene – it’s just a shame it’s at the other end of the world!

Netflix – Narcos

To mark the new series of Narcos, Netflix teamed up with language app Babbel to put on a few Narcos-based language lessons.

The Narcos Babbel lesson is designed like a regular language lesson, but instead of teaching users the basics of Spanish, the demo teaches the Spanish equivalent of what the characters in Narcos might need to know – everything from scoring deals to hiding contraband, in line with the drug crime series.

The lesson features images and audio from the series and is adapted to teach ‘Narco Spanish’ in six of Babbel’s display languages, including English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Swedish.

Desperados #breakfree

Desperados recently employed a risky tactic in a campaign in Singapore by spraying artwork across major landscapes. But all was not as it seemed, as they used LED light projections to simulate graffiti.

The campaign, by SapientNitro, took the brand’s tag line of #BreakNormal and turned it into an art hack by collaborating with local artists Zero, Tech and Brandon Tay. They chose the National Gallery, National Stadium and People’s Park Complex as the locations for the installations.

We think this is a great way for the brand to connect to Singapore in a cultural way and allow themselves to step outside the realm of their normal marketplace.

Know No

Earlier this year, the team at Marc USA Chicago, in partnership with Red Snake, took to the streets of Chicago with a few dancers. Each dancer pretended to sleep on a bench or a mattress with a sign reading, “If I can’t say no, I can’t say yes,” in front of them.

This was part of the “Know No” campaign, which aims to teach young men and women across the US about sexual consent.

Channel 4 and Maltesers promote diversity

As part of a campaign to promote diversity around the Paralympic Games, Mars will be promoting Maltesers with a series of adverts that will air on Channel 4.
They will not initially air with subtitles, but they will be added later. The aim is to remind people of “the barriers hearing impaired people face when sign or subtitles are overlooked.”

‘Try before you buy’ holidays

Expedia, the online travel company, have recently released a report claiming that 42% of millennials are influenced by photos on social media sites when choosing a holiday destination.

They’ve taken the experience a bit further by creating a virtual reality holiday, allowing users to experience what the holiday would be like before they book. Please hold while I book my ticket to Australia!

River Island reaches millennials through Snapchat

River Island has partnered with Snapchat for a unique ‘Snap & Share’ campaign. Filters are activated in River Island stores around the UK and Republic of Ireland, encouraging shoppers to take a pic and share with their friends while shopping.

Users who share pictures using the filter are entered into a competition to win a £1,000 shopping spree and a digital camera. The polaroid-style filters fit the style of their current advertising campaigns, and new filters will be released throughout the season.

Sea water pop-up

Pop-ups have been showing up everywhere in recent years. They’re trendy, hip, and people flock to visit them before they shut down. This latest pop-up is a bit different than the rest; launching at Pop Brixton on 8^th September, The Bottle is serving up sea water!

Recently, the news has sadly reported several incidents of people drowning due to dangerous water conditions, usually as they don’t fully understand ocean safety.

The aim of the campaign is to raise awareness of the conditions of the sea when swimming, the volunteer lifeboat crew members that are on duty, and for the Royal National Lifeboat Institution’s charity H2Only.

It will offer ten different regional varieties of seat water, such as “Cornish Surf” and “Thames Wash” with warnings displayed on the labels.

DIY restaurant

Ever fancy being a chef? Now you can! From 10^th to 25^th September, Ikea is launching a Do-It-Yourself space where you can serve up to 20 friends. Don’t worry, there will be a team to supervise and help clean up. Grab some friends, and see if you can assemble a winning meal!

Puppy sleepovers

“Cami, what does your dream look like?”

Well, thanks for asking. It’s this. Dogs in pyjamas. I think this might be my favourite campaign ever.

Lifeline Animal Projects from Georgia in the United States noticed that some of their dogs weren’t getting much attention from potential owners. The staff came up with the idea that if potential owners were given the chance to take the dog home for one night (dressed in PJs!) to get to know them, they’d be more likely to find a home.

It turns out they were right, as a number of dogs who’d been in the shelter for months have now found forever homes following their slumber party!

App store optimisation (ASO) is a process any business with a mobile app can follow to improve its app’s visibility in the App Store and Google Play.

The basics of ASO are straightforward: identify how potential users are browsing the app store, how they search and who is performing well; optimise your listing with strong copy and imagery; and do what you can to make your app popular. Twitter, Facebook and Google all enable brands to run campaigns encouraging app installs: the faster people download your app, the higher up the rankings your app will move.

The most effective time to consider app store optimisation is while you’re planning the creation of a smartphone app for the first time, or when you know you will be making future updates to your current app. Regular updates are a positive signal, but if the basics aren’t in place it’s only going to get you so far.

App store ranking factors

Ranking factors differ in the app stores but there is some overlap. Google has data that Apple doesn’t – such as access to the link graph – so links matter in the Android Play Store but don’t matter on iOS.

We’ve put together a downloadable checklist covering the first part of the app store optimisation process – how to launch in the app store – and we’re happy to help you with ideas for promoting your app in the comments below or on Twitter.

Googlebot does not follow links in SVG XML-markup language on web pages.

What are Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG)?

SVG stands for Scalable Vector Graphics and is used to define vector based graphics on the web. SVG is written in an XML markup language and can be edited through a simple text editor. Scalable Vector Graphics do not lose any of their quality if a user zooms in or if the image is resized.

Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalable_Vector_Graphics

What are SVG links?

A SVG link is an <a xlink:href=””> XML element which is used to link to other URI/URL documents. I have given an example of how this code looks in the image below taken from Mozilla.

To a user, this type of link will act like a HTML <a href=””> link, but to Google these are not the same thing and, in fact, Google doesn’t even follow links in the XML markup.

Crawlers and SVG Links

The SEO team at Branded3 ran a routine SEO crawl on a staging site for a site migration project, using the Screaming Frog crawler. During our analysis we noticed that a number of top level category pages weren’t appearing in the crawl.

Further investigation showed that the pages did have links that a user could interact with by clicking on them, but the crawler wasn’t picking up the links (user agent was set to Googlebot), and so looked at the code instead.

To be 100% honest, our team had never seen a <a xlink: href=””> link before. A quick Google search revealed that it was a SVG XML-markup that was being used to link to important category pages.

Interestingly, the only mention of SVGs on Google’s Official Webmaster help pages is an old post which just says they index SVG documents – https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2010/08/google-now-indexes-svg.html.

The SVG links were a crawling issue rather than an indexing one, so I thought it best to ask the team at Screaming Frog if their crawler picked up SVG links. I got a quick response from Chris at Screaming Frog, who said that the developers at Screaming Frog would test to see if Googlebot does follow links in SVG markup.

Naturally, I asked if the guys at Screaming Frog would let me know about the outcome of their test. Within a few days they updated me with the results: their tests showed that Googlebot didn’t follow links in SVG markup.

We quickly asked the client and their developers to change these links to HTML <a href””> so that Google could pick them up and follow the links.

The guys at Screaming Frog also gave me some details about their test to share, if anybody fancies running the same test!

Big shout out to the guys at Screaming Frog for not only godlike customer support, but also for being so helpful!

Google Confirms that Googlebot doesn’t follow SVG links

Since asking politely seemed to be getting me answers, I approached John Muller, a Webmaster Trend Analyst at Google, who confirmed that Google doesn’t support links in SVG markup.

@Adoubleagent AFAIK we don’t support links in SVGs, so your tests are probably correct.

— John Mueller (@JohnMu) August 22, 2016

I asked if Google would support these in the future but didn’t get a response (to be fair, he is pretty busy). If I hear back from him, I’ll update this post.

SVG links and SEO

It is also worth noting that if pages are not linked to properly within the website architecture, this may impact on organic search performance.

Not only does Google use internal linking to help understand your website pages better through internal anchor text, but the number of internal links to a page can indicate how important it is. Internal links are also important as link power is passed down the site hierarchy, from the homepage all the way to deeper level pages.

If Google cannot see SVG links that users are clicking on, then pages like E, D and G in the image below won’t gain the SEO benefits from internal linking!

Don’t use SVG links

The bottom line is that you shouldn’t place links in SVG markup if you want Google to crawl, index and rank your content. Screaming Frog’s test and the confirmation from John Mueller is strong evidence for SEO consultants (in my opinion) to advise clients against this type of linking method.

Asda commemorates Adam Peaty’s gold win

The Olympics might be over, but it doesn’t mean the PR campaigns to commemorate the winners have ended!

Once Asda found out the swimmer Adam Peaty was a regular at one of their Uttoxeter stores, they made sure he had a golden welcome back.

“Golden athletes from the London Olympics were recognised through golden post-boxes, so we thought we would bestow a similar honour upon Adam,” said Steve Biggs, general store manager.

Dolmio proves that kids are in a world of their own

We all know the magic way to calm down a child is to stick them in front of a screen – a sure way to achieve silence all day.

Dolmio wanted to find out how disconnected children are to the world around them when they are in front of a screen. The prime time to put this theory to the test is dinner time – see the experiment unfold in the video:

Google Translate does international dining

This PR campaign took place in New York, but #EveryoneSpeaksFood and we loved the simplicity of it, so stay with us.

Google Translate wanted to give locals an authentic dining experience by hosting a pop-up restaurant for 5 nights, with 18 chefs specialising in different cuisines, all held in one restaurant.

To mix it all up even more, the menu was in the native languages of the cuisines being served. Watch how diners used a bit of clever tech to pick their favourite dishes from the menu:

And then came National Burger Day!

This is another fine campaign put on by Asda that shows out-of-the-box thinking. While most restaurants and brands were offering discounts, free burgers, and best burger reviews, Asda took it up a notch and got a scientist involved.

That’s right, the megastore challenged Michael, a chef at Oxford University’s Crossmodal Research Laboratory who analyses how our senses work, to come up with the perfect burger recipe.

The great thing is, unlike offers and discounts that will expire, you have no excuse not to have the perfect burger experience any day of the week, using this scientific formula, courtesy of Asda:

Charlotte Tilbury gets a helping hand from Kate Moss to launch new fragrance

We love anything VR, especially if it has to do with Charlotte Tilbury. For the launch of the new fragrance Scent of a Dream, the 360° video showcased a parallel universe, dream world, mixed with reality, all screened through Kate’s eyes. Watch and scroll through the video below:

Well that’s all from us this week! Comment if you have seen any PR campaigns that tickled your fancy.

This isn’t without precedent – an IP law passed in Spain in 2014 charged Google and other news aggregators to show snippets of news stories and link to them ultimately ended with Google shutting down its News product in the country.

The Spanish publishing industry commissioned a study to determine the impact of the so-called “Google Tax” and found that, essentially, it was pretty bad news. From Ars Technica:

In the short-term, the study found, the law will cost publishers €10 million, or about $10.9 million, which would fall disproportionately on smaller publishers. Consumers would experience a smaller variety of content, and the law “impedes the ability of innovation to enter the market.”

Germany and Belgium previously attempted to “tax” search engines in a similar way but publishers were allowed to opt out – which many inevitably did when their traffic started to disappear. The latest EU proposals also allow publishers to opt out.

What this means

• Paying to link to content only applies to aggregators (and is really only aimed at search engines). Users will still be able to share content without penalty – if they can find it without the help of a search engine.
• The idea that brands would pay news organisations for distribution and news organisations would then be paid to have their content distributed for them is pretty stupid.
• Google doesn’t really make money from Google News so if it had to pay to populate the feature it would probably just shut it down. The only time this would be viable for Google is when Google is charging for the advertising on publishers’ websites in the first place.
• Most publishers who want this are overly dependent on search traffic. Buzzfeed gets 75% of its traffic from social (more interesting stats here). Opting in – or not opting out – will cost most publishers huge amounts of traffic and will benefit Buzzfeed, VICE etc. which will be completely legitimised as a place to put ad dollars.
• The most cost effective way for Google to “organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” would be to build a newsroom or buy a social network.

The proposals will be published in September. This will not work. In the meantime this is how you get into Google News.