#MarketingTitbits – YouTube ads, negative SEO, Marmite

1. The top 10 most popular YouTube ads of 2014
Now-a-days, the most popular YouTube ads tend to be made for an online campaigns, instead of airing on TV, so it’s no surprise that most of the top 10 featured in Marketing Week’s article have followed this trend.

Included in the list are the likes of Sainsbury’s, John Lewis, Nike, Marks & Spencer, Always and Pepsi, who all created ads with a social media audience in mind, however, also aired shorter versions on TV. A lot of brands are now creating and sharing stories within their advertisements and this can be difficult to do in a TV ad space of typically 30 to 60 seconds, and this is where YouTube comes in. Consumers are now happier to spend time with branded content online, dependent on the entertainment and relevance delivered.

If you’d like to see the top 10 adverts, you can click here.

2. What is Negative SEO and how can you protect your website?

Negative SEO is the process of using techniques similar to those of black hat SEO, but to attack and undermine a rival’s website that can lead on to damage their rankings in search results.

This can be done in many ways, including:

• Having a huge number of links directed to your site that are low-quality and spam-heavy with keywords that have little to no relevance.
• Copying content from your website that is then distributed across the internet, which could possibly interfere with Google’s policy on duplicate content.
• Damaging your reputation by being negative about your business. That could involve fake social media profiles being created, etc.

You can click here to learn more about negative SEO and the steps you can take for your business to avoid it.

3. Marmite looks to replicate 2013 success by bringing back revamped ‘End Marmite Neglect’ campaign

We spoke about the ‘love it or hate it’ brand back in November when they picked up 2014’s Brand of the Year Award, and as predicted, Unilever have chosen to start a ‘full-scale Marmageddon’ with their parody on animal rescue programmes, entitled ‘End Marmite Neglect’. Although this approach attracted over 500 complaints back in 2013, the ASA chose to take no further action with the ad, allowing the jar to make a comeback this year.

But will this campaign follow in the footsteps of the 14% sales increase that it produced in its first run?

Keep an eye out for the ad, but for now, you can read more by clicking here.