Robin Fishley

Saatchi & SaatchiBrands, Search and Content

A new way to think about search, ethics and the future

“We did search in 2007,

it was rubbish”

What brands need to understand is that searching is still the

biggest channel and searching is ALMOST ALWAYS the first step in a

purpose driven environment

Search serves a dual purpose: relevancy and visibility

All this search value hinges around the content we create and curate

Impossible

RelevantIrrelevant

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Madness

Fodder Good

Greatness

Impossible

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Madness

Fodder Good

Greatness

What SEO’s Think of Their Web Content

Impossible

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Madness

Fodder Good

Greatness

What the Media Agency Thinks

Impossible

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What Ad Agency Agencies Think

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Greatness

meh

What Brands Think of “SEO” content

Actually content is a lot more complex than this.

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GreatnessSPAM

Fodder

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Fodder

CONTENT

MILL

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CONTENT

MILL

WELL EXECUTED SEARCH

CONTENT

Fodder

Impossible

RelevantIrrelevant

Possible

Madness

Good

GreatnessSPAM

CONTENT

MILL

WELL EXECUTED SEARCH

CONTENT

Fodder

GREAT ADVERTISING

Most brands don’t understand what content is,

or even what they need from their content.

That’s our job.

Reminder: Content is anything, fact or fiction that has been released to an

audience that provides a benefit either entertaining or educational. Anything an

entity (person or brand) purposefully communicates is then classified as

“content”.

This definition stretches to cover big budget Christmas ads through to a tweet.

Metacontent is a deeper construct: Hashtag, Trend, Meme – but its still content.

How do we make search content

great content

1: Align

Brand Hierarchies

Align the content strategy with the brand hierarchy,

business needs and organizational structure

2: Clearly Define the Role of the content

Role and responsibility of your Content:

Purposeful

• Relevant and Beneficial (to both the User and to the Brand)

• Mulitfunctional (obviously)

Honest

• Unambiguous (don’t trick people)

• Ethical

• Not a sweatshop

Current & Future Proof

• Up to Date

• Evolving

• Forward Compatible

Purpose:

• Clients often don’t know the purpose of their content

• We need to help define that purpose

Future Proofing

• How will google be treating this type of content in the future

• If we project current trends – and imagine that one day everyone will have

perfectly optimized sites and perfect outreach strategies – what are the

things that will differentiate us form them?

Thinking outside of the traditional constraints of context, volume and

technical aspects

An example of Multifunctional Content

Nutritional Information chart:

Need not be a grid of numbers, use the opportunity to teach the customers about

the benefit of each of the elements on the nutritional chart. i.e.

* foods that are high in phosphorous help improve your bone density and growth

– phosphorous is good for you - a serving of our biscuits contain 10% of your

daily RDA of phosphorous but children are encouraged to eat twice the amount of

phosphorous.

3: Think about the greater good

Content is not simply a conduit?

Google will have to use more and more constructs to figure out the best

results to show for queries.

Once Search Engines delve deeper into actually “understanding” content -

then it will be able to apply different types of ranking signals to ascertain the

value of said content.

One of these ranking signals will be ethics i.e. what is the value of this

information to the world as a whole. How does this value compare with the

rest of the competitors in the pile. What would happen if everybody in the

world had this knowledge and used it. Would it make sense to rank this

piece of content higher than that one?

Will Algorithms ever use ethical evaluation of content?

Applying rules like Kantian universality to ideas and

precepts contained within content

Machine learning could easily define content and its goal –

a page rank adaptation could be applied to this network to

create an additional universality rank.