Friday Five: Alt-Text Effectiveness, Toxic Masculinity, and Why Starting Little Fires Is Good

Hello and welcome to another episode of The Friday Five!

As usual, we’ll be running through five news stories from the world of marketing that we think you should know about. We’ll give you a little summary of them and include a link to the full article in case you fancy reading them in full on this beautiful, sunny Friday.

Without further ado, let's dive headfirst into this week’s Friday Five!

1. Start ‘Little Fires’ If You Want to Bring Creativity into Your Business

A former marketing manager at insurance company Hiscox has urged those who work in the wonderful world of B2B marketing should focus on starting ‘little fires’ when it comes to creativity, as opposed to something radical, and probably expensive.

Speaking at the Festival of Marketing: Transform (presumably a long way off from Glastonbury) Annabel Venner said: “Start with little fires, don’t try to do something really big. Then you can make it happen.”

She added: “Marketing, in terms of how the brand works, doesn’t fit on a spreadsheet. You can’t say ‘Give me ￡10m and I’ll guarantee at the end of the year I’ll drive you X in ROI.’ It’s very different, but you have to go with a mind of how you’re selling that in internally.”

Annabel and her fellow panellists discussed how in industries that are governed by metrics such as revenue, profit, and ROI, injecting necessary creativity into a business can be difficult.

By starting small, with clever campaigns - such as the one Annabel herself worked on at Hiscox which involved bald men and combs - she was able to justify a greater marketing budget.

Think of your next great marketing plan as something that can demonstrate why you can do even more if those above you were to unlock more investment.

Check out everything Annabel said here.

2. Picture This: Alt-Text Only a Factor for Image Search

Alt-text is a term that gets thrown around in SEO circles and has, to a large degree, been seen as a relatively important ranking factor. At the very least, alt-text in images and on web pages has been seen as something that you should at least have a go at.

Then, along came Google’s Search Advocate John Mueller. In a recently published chinwag John had at Google’s Search Central SEO office, he professed that “from an SEO point of view the alt text really helps us to understand the image better for image search”.

In other words, the carefully-crafted optimised alt-text for your web pages is nothing more than decorative.

Sure, it might help a user pick between your page and another but it won’t be a deciding factor for Google’s bots when they crawl your site.

When creating alt-text for images, a place where it does impact image search rankings, Mueller placed a great deal of importance on ensuring what you’re writing is descriptive.

He said: “I would avoid the situation where you’re just repeating the same thing over and over”

A good rule of thumb for image alt-text is to make it as unique as possible and try to describe the image in a way that you haven’t before.

Do that, and you’re laughing all the way to the top of the image search rankings.

Check our Search Engine Journal’s full article here:

3. Dump the Toxic Masculinity from Ads, Say a Majority of Men

‘Lads lads lads’, lager, and loutish behaviour - these three less-than-charming traits could all be filed under Toxic Masculinity. A term used to describe the ways in which males behave which have a destructive impact on men, and wider society in general.

While it may appear that plenty of men enjoys these traits, new research by Amplify suggests that the majority of men want these stereotypes ditched from the advertisements they see on screen.

In their Young Blood research series, Amplify surveyed 2,029 young men about what being a man means to them in 2022.

Encouragingly, all the main findings point to a society of young men that feel more needs to be done.

For instance:

• 61% of men believe brands have a responsibility to shape what masculinity looks like.
• 60% of men think advertisements should promote gender equality.
• 70% of those that responded felt that parts of masculinity impact men negatively.
• 86% face pressure to look a certain way.
• 25% of participants have had poorer mental health as a result of society’s expectations of men.

Nike and Lynx were two brands that were highlighted as having done positive things both for men and the perception of masculinity. And, while that’s great, it's clear that much, much more needs to be done.

Check out the full article on The Drum here:

4. iPhone Subscription, Anyone?

A report by Bloomberg, featured in Mashable, has claimed that Apple is working on a new subscription-based service for its iPhones. Yep, that's right, according to the ‘berg, Apple wants you to pay recurring fees for your phones in return for access to the latest iPhone.

It's important to note two things from the report. One, it's light on specific and Apple have declined to comment (but no smoke without fire, right?), and two, nowhere does it say Apple will stop selling iPhones outright.

In a world where everything from the beer you drink to the car you drive is paid for with a monthly subscription, surely a phone is the next (seemingly) logical step?

Critics of this news have argued that Apple already does this with their iPhone Upgrade Program which allows people to pay monthly fees with a promise of a new iPhone every year.

Having checked this out myself, it’s hard to find the difference between the current programme and the one Bloomberg is reporting on.

Only time will tell, I suppose.

Read more about the report, and the negative reaction, here.

5. Fans of a Chronological IG Feed, Rejoice (To a Point)!

Instagram’s current main feed is now a hodgepodge mix of your followers’ pictures, adverts, and suggested content from meme accounts that you didn’t ask for. This lack of control over what appears on your feed has been criticised by users for some time now. So, when Meta announced that IG was going to start offering a different view of your main feed - one that was chronological and featured only content from people you followed - people rejoiced.

However, there is a catch or two (as some eagle-eyed users spotted).

Firstly, IG’s default view is still the one that is packed with the content you didn’t ask to see and it doesn’t seem that you can set your preferred view as a default.

Secondly and perhaps more importantly, the option to switch feeds seemingly hints at a future where the default feed is packed with even more adverts, sponsored content, and videos and images from suggested accounts.

“Over time, we're going to add more recommendations to your feed based on your interests — Favorites and Following are new ways to catch up on recent posts from the accounts you follow,” said the press release.

If you want to read more about this, head over to Mashable’s article.

That’s your lot for this week’s Friday Five! If you have any articles from this week that you think people should know about - leave them in the comments section below.

See you next time!