Super Bowl 2008: The Losing Brands
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | February 6, 2008 | Share This
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This week Reprise Media released its Super Bowl Search Marketing Scorecard, and yesterday we highlighted last year’s winners. Today we turn our attention to the bottom three - the brands that did a poor job integrating television and search marketing, missing out on the huge influx of game-related Internet traffic.
The Super Bowl drew a record 97.5 million viewers this year - its largest audience ever and the second largest ratings number in all of TV history (the 1983 MASH finale took first place). Nearly 20% of the TV audience made it online last year; if that percentage stuck, it translates to about 19 million people this year.
But the people that didn’t capitalize on that traffic bump this year are…
- Disney
Its ad for upcoming animated feature WALL-E got Disney fans in our office really excited, but the company didn’t run any paid search ads, much less paid search targeting its Super Bowl ad. Moreover, though the movie showed up in organic results, its landing page had no Super Bowl related content, even though it appears Disney set up YouTube channels for both WALL-E and the other movie it was advertising, Prince Caspian. Disney’s presence in the bottom three is reflective of the performance of most of the entertainment companies that advertised during the Super Bowl; they treated the biggest ad day of the year like business as usual.
- Hershey’s
The Hershey’s ad for IceBreakers gum with Carmen Electra wasn’t groundbreaking in creativity, but it would really have benefited from a tighter online strategy. First, the ad was not supported by any paid search, failing to take advantage of its spokesperson’s star power or it’s “Whoa” tagline. The brand wasn’t visible in organic searches for the term “Ice Breakers,” so their landing page, which actually isn’t so bad because it does include the ad and outtakes, was very difficult to find. They should have made all the video content on their landing page embeddable, though, becaue the page that looks like it might be the official Ice Breakers YouTube channel is totally underdeveloped, featuring just the one video that aired on game day. The TV ad also failed to include a URL or call to action. Ice Breakers Ice Cubes gum was hard to find in organic search, and missing from paid search, making for missed opportunities all around.
- Zantac
Our biggest loser this year, Zantac did nearly everything wrong when it comes to integrating TV and online marketing. Like our other losers, the company did not run any paid search (and its competitors most certainly did). Though Zantac did include a URL in its ad, there was no call to action, and its landing page didn’t feature the ad. Zantac failed to upload its spot to MySpace’s Super Bowl 2008 ad channel. It also didn’t take advantage of YouTube’s Super Bowl ad channel or create its own branded channel (they do have the ad up on AOL Video, but YouTube gets the most traffic so they should have been there). Zantac definitely has a presence on YouTube, but probably not the presence they want to have there: take a look at the screenshot below, where the first two video results feature the words “junk” and “yucky,” two terms no company wants people to associate with its brand.
In sum, though 70% of advertisers bought branded keywords this year, up 20% over last year, our Scorecard losers missed the boat. Interestingly, all the brands, even our winners, lost points in one regard: though almost half of them had branded social media profiles, no advertisers called it out in their TV ad this year. We’ll write more about social media in tomorrow’s post, so stay tuned. Download the full Search Marketing Scorecard on the Reprise Media website.
Topics: Advertising: Offline, Advertising: Online, Search Marketing Scorecard |
[…] Donna DeClemente wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptIts ad for upcoming animated feature WALL-E got Disney fans in our office really excited, but the company didn’t run any paid search ads, much less paid search targeting its Super Bowl ad. Moreover, though the movie showed up in organic … Read the rest of this great post here […]
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