Andrew FrankWhat do “Shankapotamus”, “PepSuber”, “drinkability”, and “LMAO” have in common? Two things, actually. First, they’re all words that advertisers spent $100,000 per second to build buzz around during the Super Bowl, and secondly, they were all available as search terms on Google the morning after the advertising aired.
The current highest ranking link for “shankapotamus” for example leads here, to this apparently unaffiliated and unsuspecting blogger’s site. For those who missed it, the word comes from E*Trade’s hilarious and highly memorable ad. Loved the ad, too bad about the missing traffic.
So why are advertisers in an economy like this spending millions on Superbowl ads to light a spark of interest but neglecting to convert that interest to online engagement with search? This is not exactly a novel problem. Three years ago, in a legendary advertising coup, GM learned that Ford would be running a Super Bowl ad featuring Kermit the Frog to promote its FlexFuel “green” hybrids and bought the keyword “kermit” first, thus effectively drafting most of the web search traffic the ad generated. That same year AT&T rolled out “mLife” on the Super Bowl and was roundly criticized for having nothing for users who then searched for “mLife” online. I’d have thought the lesson would be clear.
Advertisers have gotten a little better since then, and not all of them missed the boat on search. GE, for example, ran this Scarecrow ad (check it out, on Hulu even the ads have ads), and bought “Scarecrow” on Google, but so did IBM, with the suggestive “Saw our Grid TV Ad?” …although their link appears to have no connection to the advertising. GE’s site, however, does a good job of expanding on its story and the ad contains a memorable URL, ecomagination.com, that also captures traffic (GE and IBM both bought that keyword too).
In fact, our most recent survey of marketers and agencies suggests that it’s the ad agencies, rather than their clients, that are lagging behind in cross-platform execution. The thinking is clearly there, but it seems organizational barriers are still hampering results. Clients should be demanding this from their agencies before they sign off on Super Bowl-sized campaigns.
The good news is, not only does the Super Bowl still generate buzz and sell out its advertising, but the buzz gets highly amplified by social media like Twitter and YouTube. If only the agencies could figure out how to connect the dots.
Category: Uncategorized Tags: Advertising, Commercials, Media, Shankapotamus, Super Bowl
5 responses so far ↓
1 Andrew Frank: Super Bowl Advertisers Fumble Their Keywords February 3, 2009 at 1:42 am
[...] Andrew Frank on Sunday’s big spenders who forgot to invest the pocket change on related paid search. [...]
2 AdHack Blog – Super Bowl Search Terms: Fail February 3, 2009 at 5:32 pm
[...] or whatever they want to call their internal view of the world, along comes a story like this: Super Bowl Advertisers Fumble Their Keywords. What do “Shankapotamus”, “PepSuber”, “drinkability”, and “LMAO” have in common? [...]
3 Economics of the Superbowl & Search Marketing « Economics of Advertising February 6, 2009 at 3:22 am
[...] a specific call to action in the TVC, miraculously the highest in the past five years. Conversely, Gartner reports 65% of advertisers did construct specific Search strategies to leverage the opportunity (up around [...]
4 Try Reading the Rules, Shankapotamus March 5, 2009 at 9:51 pm
[...] it’s been over five weeks since I lambasted the big Superbowl ad spenders at companies like – oh, let’s see, what was the name of that [...]
5 The Future of TV on the Gridiron February 8, 2010 at 8:21 pm
[...] year I wrote about how advertisers like E*Trade had fumbled keywords like shankapotamus, turning over their traffic to folks like me. This year E*Trade got the message and bought [...]