Take a look at the YouTube UK Homepage today, for More Th>n's 'More Than Freeman' campaign - proof that you can make a splash with insurance!
Their Click-to-Play masthead plays a short clip from the 'rooftile' home insurance ad and then leads through More Th>n's branded YouTube channel for more TV ads, a 'making of the ads' film, and other features such as links through to follow on Twitter and Facebook.
For more information about YouTube and the opportunities for your brand, just get in touch with your Google contacts :)
Today, a great example of a UK financial services company using the YouTube homepage takeover masthead ad format to gain brand visibility. Visa are running a 'Pay with Visa' competition and driving traffic to their own competition site through the YouTube masthead.
The YouTube homepage delivers ~9,500,000 daily impressions in the UK
54% of YouTube users in the UK are aged 35+
(Source: Nielsen Sep 2010)
For more examples of finance (and other) brands using YouTube please visit our YouTube Creative Hub
Cross post from the Official Google Blog, by Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience
Search as you type. It’s a simple and straightforward idea — people can get results as they type their queries. Imagining the future of search, the idea of being able to search for partial queries or provide some interactive feedback while searching has come up more than a few times. Along the way, we’ve even built quite a few demos (notably, Amit Patel in 1999 and Nikhil Bhatla in 2003). Our search-as-you-type demos were thought-provoking—fun, fast and interactive—but fundamentally flawed. Why? Because you don’t really want search-as-you-type (no one wants search results for [bike h] in the process of searching for [bike helmets]). You really want search-before-you-type—that is, you want results for the most likely search given what you have already typed.
As you can imagine, searching even before someone types isn’t easy—which is why we are so excited today to be unveiling Google Instant. Google Instant is search-before-you-type. Instant takes what you have typed already, predicts the most likely completion and streams results in real-time for those predictions—yielding a smarter and faster search that is interactive, predictive and powerful.
Here are a few of the core features in Google Instant:
Dynamic Results - Google dynamically displays relevant search results as you type so you can quickly interact and click through to the web content you need.
Predictions - One of the key technologies in Google Instant is that we predict the rest of your query (in light gray text) before you finish typing. See what you need? Stop typing, look down and find what you’re looking for.
Scroll to search - Scroll through predictions and see results instantly for each as you arrow down.
Here’s a video that explains Google Instant in greater depth:
To bring Google Instant to life, we needed a host of new technologies including new caching systems, the ability to adaptively control the rate at which we show results pages and an optimization of page-rendering JavaScript to help web browsers keep up with the rest of the system. In the end, we needed to produce a system that was able to scale while searching as fast as people can type and think—all while maintaining the relevance and simplicity people expect from Google.
The user benefits of Google Instant are many—but the primary one is time saved. Our testing has shown that Google Instant saves the average searcher two to five seconds per search. That may not seem like a lot at first, but it adds up. With Google Instant, we estimate that we’ll save our users 11 hours with each passing second!
As part of our current rollout, Google Instant will become the core search experience on Google.com for Chrome, Firefox, Safari and IE 8. We’ll also be offering Google Instant to our users in France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Spain and the U.K. who are signed in and have Instant-capable browsers. Over the coming weeks and months, we’ll work to roll out Google Instant to all geographies and platforms.
We’re very excited about today’s announcement and hope that you are too. Give Google Instant a try and let us know what you think!
You might have seen NMA's vertical focus piece on Finance from the 26th August. It's chock full of advertiser points of view from the sector, and raises some interesting discussion points. Our own head, Ian Morgan, was asked to comment on some trends and issues affecting the financial services market, such as social media, consumer interaction, keyword management, and mobile marketing. These are all key issues and ones we're bound to be discussing further in coming months.
Key discussion points:
The UK financial services industry is back to its fastest growth rate since September 2007 (Source: CBI)
The financial services industry has been slow to take up social media, due to concerns over regulation and the traditionally conservative nature of finance sector marketing
Some advertisers have managed to break the mold and lead the way with successful social media campaigns, for both traffic acquisition and brand awareness/engagement
Consumer appetite for conversation and reassurance is strong, raising a challenge for all financial services advertisers to formulate a response to this demand
Strategic search management is vital. Keeping abreast of online consumer demand and reacting by appearing against relevant keywords (including longtail) and providing tailored adtext will allow advertisers to gain cost effective leads. Using new ad formats such as Sitelinks will allow better traffic management and help guide users to the most relevant of your products or offers.
We encourage all financial services advertisers to have discussions around these important areas. Innovate where you can, learn from others in your sector, and most importantly, test and learn!
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