Big brands are looking at search marketing as a way to get their products onto consumers’ radar, but their execution right now is spotty, due to an underestimate of the powere of integrating search marketing with other ad channels. That seemed the main lesson to be learned from a sessions on “Putting Search in the Ad Mix” at this week’s Search Engine Strategies New York meeting. [For more on this story, click to the DirectBuzz SES blog.]
Using search to promote a brand goes against history and marketing culture, in a sense, because search engine marketing (SEM) has traditionally been a direct-response channel. SEM ended in some kind of conversion—either an online purchase, a lead, or a registration—which seems to be at odds with branding’s aims, namely creating awareness and fostering consumer associations that will lead to later consideration.
But Ron Belanger, senior director for global advertiser strategy and development with Yahoo! Search Marketing, said that in fact, research shows that many people first become aware of a brand through Web sites, and that they get to those sites through search. That’s particularly true as consumers move into new life stages and choose new products without preconceived notions of brands. He cited Yahoo! retail studies of new college students and first-time parents that revealed they were heavily influenced in their choice of new products by the Web.
Once they’re aware of a brand over the Web, consumers are increasingly likely to include it among the names in their consideration and comparison stage before a purchase. Belanger pointed to a travel survey that found that 27% of respondents would consider a brand they’d never heard of simply because it was listed in the top five results in a Web search.
Jonathan Mendez, director of emarketing at DigitalGrit, presented a case study of an interactive campaign his agency put together around a Super Bowl commercial by Prudential Insurance title “Retirement Red Zone.” The agency strategized a campaign of both display ads and paid search ads on Google and Yahoo! linked to the TV spot. The paid search ads used keywords related to both Super Bowl and retirement. The search ad creative featured the Prudential brand name heavily, and Digital Grit created landing pages tailored to the ad message.
One challenge for the Web campaign was that the demographic most interested in retirement is men 55 and older—not highly active Web users—while those most interested in Super Bowl ads are actually women 18 to 34. So the aim was simply to reinforce the impression of the ad and ensure the visibility of the Prudential name and its association with retirement planning.
To measure the impact of the commercial, Mendez used the Yahoo! Buzz tool, which rates the proportion of all Yahoo! searches that contain a given keyword. That revealed that the brand keyword “Prudential” was searched 37% more in the Saturday-Monday weekend around the Super Bowl than it had been in the weekends preceding the game. “That shows the power of the media mix and TV bringing people to search,” he said. “The ability of offline media to impact search behavior is unquestionable. Search has an important and necessary place in the ad mix.”
Chris Copeland, partner and managing director at Outrider Search Marketing, predicted that within a year most brand advertisers will have gotten the concept of reinforcing their offline campaigns with SEM. “We’re talking about small spot opportunities now, such as the Super Bowl, but I think we’re seeing an evolution in the ad world to acknowledging search’s importance,” he said.
But that evolution isn’t taking hold everywhere yet, and many of the stories recounted during the session were of missed opportunities for effective search campaigns. Belanger brought up the two “Brown and Bubbly” spots run by Diet Pepsi during the Super Bowl featuring P. Diddy and Jackie Chan—two eminently searchable names and one URL that were nowhere to be found in paid search ads.
David Roth, director of search marketing for Carat Fusion, recalled Coca-Cola’s launch of its C2 product a few years ago, which had (and still has) a Web site but no pay-per-click component. When Coke announced a new coffee-flavored drink called Coke Black in December, he said, he was convinced they would do a better job of integrating search into the launch-- but no, no paid search for that product either. And during the Winter Olympics, Roth went out to see if the company was doing paid search for their newest commercial on the keyword “Olympics”. While Coke did indeed have a paid listing keyed to the event, it didn’t relate to their TV spot but to consumer information about the importance of staying hydrated.
“That’s a missed opportunity,” he said. “Search is the expression of demand that’s created by other media. It’s like a pot of gold that’s sitting out there, and if you don’t grab it, it’s gone once the search has happened.”
