Super Bowl 2007: Automobile Ads Missed the Point
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Written By Kate Zimmermann | February 8, 2007 | Share This
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Take a second look at our Super Bowl Search Marketing Scorecard and you’ll notice that the lower half of our list is largely populated by automobile brands. GM, Chevrolet, Ford, Acura and Mercedes all received mediocre scores, while Toyota and Honda received slightly higher average scores. Now, I’ve been to several trade show where speakers from the marketing departments of Ford, Chevrolet, Toyota, etc, will tout their sophisticated adoption of new media and consumer-generated “engagement”, giving the impression that these guys know how to create integrated cross-channel campaigns. So what’s the deal? Why is it that all car makers, across the board, fell short during the Super Bowl?
A Hitwise study gleans some insight,
“We rarely compile custom categories of unrelated sties, and just seeing how a site like careerbuilder.com ranks against Toyota is eye-opening. Both sites are #1 in their respective categories, but Careerbuilder.com has a market share of visits 16x greater than Toyota…To me, it demonstrates the importance of online brand management through consumer generated media.”
Check out LeeAnn Prescott’s full report for more interesting traffic stats from Super Bowl Sunday. Granted, for businesses like CareerBuilder.com that are entirely internet-based, you’d expect a significantly higher market share. But, compared to other consumer-product companies that primarily use their websites for branding (rather than online sales), the automakers fall short.
That’s not to say they didn’t spend money - other than the alcohol industry (dominated by Bud/Bud Light), car makers bought the largest number of super bowl TV spots. Their commercials were sleek, well-composed, and heavily focused on cinematography. As such, they generated a significant amount of interest from viewers who went online seeking replays of the commercials. Rather than find paid ads from the car companies, however, searchers found affiliate sites, spam sites, and Edmunds.com. Edmunds, incidentally, did a brilliant job of aggregating commercial replays and buying paid search against all brands. In the meantime, automakers were completely absent in search for branded and generic terms. Following GM and Ford’s well-integrated hybrid car ads last year, this came as a bit of a surprise.
Despite their relative absence in paid search, the two areas where automakers fell most short were a) Having a call to action, b) Integrating their TV commercial with their website. 90% of the automakers didn’t reference the super bowl on their home pages, 90% lacked a CTA in both their TV ads and online, 90% didn’t offer replays of their TV ads, and 100% did not create landing pages integrated with their commercials (based on Reprise Media data). As a result, car makers didn’t give any incentive to visit or explore their sites.
As Prescott writes in her report, consumer-generated media was a major part of this year’s Super Bowl ad campaigns. There’s tremendous opportunity for an industry whose brands are so richly infused with our culture to leverage their popularity by promoting content that can be picked up by CGM websites- namely, YouTube, Revver, Myspace, etc. But mere presence in those sites is meaningless if it’s disconnected from the automakers website. As it stands, most automakers treat their sites like an extension of their brochures - which, no matter how slick in design, is poor use of the Internet.
Topics: Search Marketing Scorecard |