The sausage saga sizzles on

October 18, 2007 · Filed Under 4-4-2 Pub, Life in Italy, Milan · Comment

As I write, two super sausage sourcers, Liz and Claire from Lingo Design, are doing their level best to ensure that good old British bangers wend their way to Milan in time for the launch of the 4-4-2s full English breakfast, theoretically in little more than one week!

So, big thanks to Liz and Claire for their admirable attempts to ensure that a decent breakfast will be served up! Cheers!

If you are ever in Milan, the beers on me! And the sausages!

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Tags: 4-4-2, 4-4-2 Pub, bangers, beer, breakfast, Claire, cumberland sausages, design, English, english breakfast, good, Lingo Design, Liz, Milan, pub, sausages

When an advert isn’t. Or is it?

October 18, 2007 · Filed Under Blogging · 5 Comments

During one of my English language classes today we started discussing one of the projects that my students had worked on as part of their marketing master. This project happened to involve creating a marketing and communications plan for a holiday resort (tourist village/villaggio turistico) in Italy. During our discussion I mentioned Booking.com, one of the foremost on-line hotel booking sites in the world. In an attempt to justify stating that all hotels should be listed on Booking.com, I typed ‘hotels, Italy’ into Google and, lo and behold, the first sponsored ad was for Booking.com. However, one of my students noticed that Booking.com did not appear in the normal search results. Effectively she intimated that she would be more likely to click on a normal search result, than on one of the sponsored keyword generated ads. Indeed, had Booking.com appeared at the top of the normal results she would have visited the site most probably.

Very interesting I thought, how ‘normal’ Google’ results were not perceived by this person as being adverts, even though, in my opinion, they function in much the same way. I wonder how many others think in the same way, and do not perceive search engine results as being advertising. Quite a few, I imagine, and this may indicate that SEO is potentially more effective than keyword advertising.

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Tags: ad, ads, advertising, adverts, adwords, booking.com, English language, Google, hotels, interesting, Italy, keyword, keywords, marketing, master, opinion, perception, project, search engine, seo

Desperately seeking sausages!

October 18, 2007 · Filed Under 4-4-2 Pub · 6 Comments

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to find 100 good quality vacuum-packed Cumberland sausages and export them asap to the 4-4-2 pub here in Milan, Italy. This blog post will self-destruct within 15 seconds.

Yep, finding English sausages has poor Alessandro down at the 4-4-2 pub banging his head against a brick wall. The search for these elusive sausages really is proving a ‘mission impossible’. So, if any of my English readers out there know where to get vacuum packed Cumberland bangers and can DHL, TNT, UPS or FedEx them over to Milan in Italy, Alessandro, and I, will be eternally grateful and all expenses will be paid. If the sausages prove to be a success, then this could well turn into a fixed weekly order for 100 or so of these things. Sorry to bang on about this, but one would not imagine that in the 21st century getting something as banal as British bangers over to Italy could be so darned difficult. This is an SOS - Save Our Sausages!

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