By Carsten Kraus

Developments in semantic search allow people to find what they want online quickly and easily with potentially huge implications for ecommerce.

The next big step in search engine functionality is here. Semantic search seeks to improve internet search accuracy by understanding a user’s intent and the contextual meaning of the terms they use to generate more relevant results.

The ability to type a query in your own words and have the search engine understand the inferences of the language has powerful implications for ecommerce. For example, at the moment there are no websites that could handle queries such as ‘show largest LCD TV under £5,000 with 2 USB ports’ or ‘show lightweight camera with compact zoom’. With semantic searching, however, this becomes possible as it allows the concept of ‘lightweight’ to be defined in context, as well as allowing users to select search criteria across a much wider field than is currently available.

What’s more, it can even interact with users to refine an initial search. For example, someone keying in ‘lightweight trousers for friend’s wedding’ may be asked anything from: “What is your friend’s age and status?” to: “Is the wedding in summer or winter?”.

We worked with Germany’s leading travel site, weg.de, on its recently launched full semantic search function, which allows browsers to find holidays simply by using a combination of vague ideas, such as “with 2 children over Christmas somewhere warm”. To make sense of this, the system behind weg.de draws from a geographic database, containing information such as a region’s climate, terrain and sites of interest – from museums to restaurants. This is then combined with dynamic information, such as travel time, number of travellers and so on. To handle this, we created a Probabilistic Inference Engine that enabled us to build up a cloud of possibilities and then quickly remove examples that are not relevant, allowing the search function to solve complex, real-world queries.

For example, someone could be searching for “Scotland New Year with beach”. While this is a valid request, a normal inference engine would reject it, because it would associate the term “beach” with someone looking for a warm holiday – and it is never going to be “warm” in Scotland over New Year. However, the person making the search could simply want a beach view.

One of the most powerful aspects of semantic search is that it is an evolving process. As the volume of search data builds up, the system will start to ‘learn’ customer behaviour and develop its own understanding of words. Through what we term Semantic Collaborative Filtering, the system would be able to make certain key associations. For example, it could learn that single people using the search term “Mallorca beach” like to travel to El Arenal, while those with families prefer other beaches. This is knowledge the software will be able to acquire automatically, so even if the system has never encountered a specific query before, it can still compute the best possible results.

To take full advantage of semantic search our searching habits will have to change. Research shows that, currently, people want to be able to get the right search results without having to type too much – with around 80 to 90% of searches being four words or under. However, we’ll need to move on from such primitive searching to entering free-form queries in our own words. This is where the power of semantic search lies, and with the technology for intelligent searching now well within our grasp, it shouldn’t be long before more people start making the change and reap the rewards through better results.

Carsten Kraus is chief executive of Europe’s leading online search specialist FACT-Finder.

 

By Dave Williams

Whether you have 500 or 50,000 Facebook fans, it don’t mean a thing if you’re not in the swing of user engagement. If your intention is to market to your fan base with a view to driving sales, there are some fundamentals to bear in mind.

Firstly, always remember that Facebook is a social network. Imagine the world’s biggest cocktail party, with hosts and hundreds of guests, all getting to know one another. You might have ulterior motives for attending but it would be a serious faux pas to corner someone with the hard sell. Exchanging views and business cards would be much more appropriate. Having someone Like or engage with a brand on Facebook is the digital equivalent of getting that card.

Secondly Facebook is an interchangeable mobile channel, not an extension of your static website. Working it correctly demands an investment of time and budget, one-to-one dialogue, incentivised offers and promotions. Talk to your audience, ask questions, post updates. Reply to their messages (friendly or otherwise) quickly and honestly, be prepared to accept feedback and demonstrate that you’re listening.

Brands should avoid at all costs driving users off the Facebook domain. Once they leave, the ability to exploit their social graph and target friends by proxy is lost and conversion rates drop dramatically; instead use Facebook Ads to drive traffic to a custom tab on your page, to act as a soft landing before leading them on to your brand site for the complete e-commerce experience.

Among those getting it right are Innocent Drinks and the fashionista’s favourite Topshop. Granted, both have the advantage of selling products we generally like and enjoy – healthy fruit-based drinks and clothes – but while their brand positioning is quite different, the way they engage their Facebook following is the same. Vibrant, visually-led Walls with lots of areas to explore, easy up-to-the-minute customer exchanges, games, competitions and offers intertwined with product news, TV and display ads and kooky asides. Reinforcing the point that numbers aren’t everything, whereas Topshop has 8.5 times more followers than Innocent (at the time of writing), over twice as many Innocent fans are actually talking about the drinks company to each other and their friends (4.8% compared to Topshop’s 2%).

Innocent drinks, getting it right on Facebook

A strong engagement strategy should always be centered around the social graph. Facebook is one of the greatest tools with which to grab and inspire an audience, and maximise consumer influence. There's no better way to do this than through the diverse amount of valuable information openly shared by Facebook users, which ranges from age and gender to hobbies and interests, geographic locations and more – all of which can be leveraged by brands to serve up targeted ads.

For me consumer-initiated ads are the future of advertising, not only on Facebook, but across other social networks too. Facebook's Sponsored Stories - initiated by the consumer, not the brand - is one of the cleverest ways to tap into this data mine. Here the user becomes a brand champion, with micro interactions such as likes, posts, check-ins or apps used relayed to friends and turned into subtle, but promoted content.

To illustrate, a coffee shop might pay to have a percentage of all brand check-ins featured in a Sponsored Story. Brand generated content is then replaced with a user’s friend’s actions. When users see their friends Like that coffee shop, they are more likely to notice, remember and interact with the story. It’s one of the easiest and most authentic routes to going viral.

Starbucks is the obvious brand example here that has utilised Sponsored Stories well, steadily building up its fan base before using the social graph to pick up on discussions around coffee breaks and its various food and drink products, and serving up ads with a social context. Starbucks is mostly using it to highlight friends' check-ins at local Starbucks stores. The product itself is broken into four possible buys for advertisers - page Likes and check-ins, and actions Facebook is calling ‘application play’ and Page Posts.

Starbucks is a well known social media success story

With over 800 million users worldwide and a constant flow of consumer opinions, another utilisation of your Facebook audience is as focus group – perhaps the most immediate, accurate and cost effective in existence. Carefully crafted questions can return comments and feedback that helps us better understand brand composition and levels of audience responsiveness. Remarketing on the back of this and running a sharp eye over the resulting performance data will reveal which interest groups performed best across specific audience segments.

Beyond segmentation analysis it’s possible to uncover telling brand insights that a traditional focus group might never have found, along with surprising correlations between consumers and brands. Such insights have led brands to modify creative and media placements across digital and traditional channels with impressive results.

Measuring your social media success can be done in a variety of ways – obsessing over the number of click-throughs per ad is not one of them. By all means scrutinise engagement rates, conversion rates and unique click through rates, but remember that metrics around audience reach, frequency, earned and shared media value will offer far more valuable insights into how well your Facebook campaigns are doing.

Dave Williams is CEO at BLiNQ Media.

See Facebook being put to excellent use by Samsung, Pandora and the award-winning Fuck Tree from Sweden. 

By Mike Woods, Framestore

I know very little about this week's clip, other than that it’s Japanese and by Daihei Shibata. It’s a stunning step into a post-Chris Cunningham world. Scary. Brilliant. 

[BRDG007] PLMS_IV_D (SyncBody) from BRDG on Vimeo.

 

By Mike Woods, Framestore  

Fantastic clip this week. Ecotricity are trying to change the behaviour of energy companies in the UK, and have made a great promo video. More info here http://www.facebook.com/ecotricity

 

We rarely carry agency stories on Cream, although as with most rules, there are always notable exceptions. 

I'm going to resist the temptation to make jokes about disaster-themed storylines on the Archers, and instead just share the news that Inferno has joined forces with Farm. 

Inferno has hired the founders and Executive Creative Directors of Farm, Owen Lee and Gary Robinson, along with other Farm staff to bolster its talent pool in light of the agency’s spate of new business wins, including Nokia, NSPCC and Legal & General. A number of key clients will also be moving with the Farm team.

Cream regulars will recognise Inferno for its contributions from Bambos Neophytou and Robin Jaffray. As a special treat, you can also catch Inferno's strategic planner Jani Cortesini, deliver his brilliant presentation from Extra Life: The gaming guide for brands. 

 

Browsing through the small ads is one of my guilty pleasures. It never ceases to amaze me the strange and bizarre things that people will advertise. Even in a prosaic title such as the Metro, the rubbish-but-popular free paper that litters the London Underground, there are opportunities to take part in clinical trials, go on a date, start a lawsuit or become an adult film actor. 

It's rare that brands bother with space in the classifieds. The sometimes off-beat and often sexual nature of the content would make most brands jittery - but not, it appears Hendrick's Gin. 

Hendrick's is spirit brand with an image built on the unusual and quirky, so if anybody was going to be found amongst the dodgy solicitors and seedy hotels - the red light district of advertising - it was going to be Hendrick's. On this occasion the gin connoissieur's favourite used the opportunity to warn its male consumers about the marriage proposal dangers of 29 February. 

Check out some other classifieds brand case studies on Cream:

Love your crisps | Tayto, Ireland

Lighting up the housing market | EPM, Colombia

Ads in the classifieds | 7UP, UAE

Originally posted on the M&M blog.

Superheroes, like science fiction, are now acceptable to like in public. This trend can be attributed to a number of events: the cult series Heroes, the popularity of the DVD box-set that helped cult TV go mainstream and the new maturity of superhero representations on the big screen. The corny comic-book adaptations of the 1980s are now cult cinema curios compared to the superhero films that will hit screens in 2012; Christopher Reeve's square-jawed Superman would get a proper kicking from Christian Bale's Dark Knight. Confirmation of the hero concept as trend, if any were needed, arrives in form of the new Lego Superhero series that hits shops soon.

When we were working on the branding concept for the BRAVES, superheroes became part of the imagery very early on. An award that celebrated the heroes of video, needed to have some heroic figures to represent them. Eventually, the perfect amount of caffeine and lively discussion created a brief for the characters who would become The BRAVES, and this brief was brought to life by the brilliant artist, Noma Bar. 

Bar is famous for his deceptively complex graphic illustrations. Using blocks of colour and simple shapes, the man is a master of negative space and efficient graphic style. In short, he's a bit of a genius, and it's a bit of a coup for the BRAVES that he agreed to produce our characters.

Introducing: TEAM BRAVES

 

CAMPAIGN BRAVE

Smart and strategic, Campaign BRAVE has a plan and is in control. A master of innovation and insight, his mission is to promote the best use of video in advertising campaigns. The Campaign BRAVES category promotes the best in video campaign innovation and creative planning. 

 

CONTENT BRAVE

Content BRAVE is an artist, always looking to capture that moving image and experiment with new techniques and aesthetics. The Content BRAVES celebrate the art in video and specifically reward the role of branded video content where there brand has been involved from the outset. 

 

TECHNICAL BRAVE

Nobody knows where he came from. With tools for platforms, players, analytics and distribution, strong, silent Technical BRAVE is essential to the video ecosystem. His best work often goes unnoticed, so the Technical BRAVES are designed to recognise the best technical contributions and innovations to the video landscape.

Information about the BRAVES.

Video-based case studies found on Cream.

An interview with Noma Bar.