Ad Agency Callout: Reprise Media to Bartle Bogle Hegarty Honcho Steve Harty -You’re Wrong About Search Marketing
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Written By Joshua Stylman | June 30, 2008 | Share This
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AdWeek today has an interesting article by Brian Morrissey examining how big agencies use or don’t use Search Marketing to market themselves. The thrust was that few of them do - which seems to me like a real wasted opportunity. I was almost done with the piece when I got to this quote from Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH) Chairman Steve Harty:
“We’re not convinced that the people we are marketing to are using that as a channel…We have a more targeted strategy than, ‘We’re open for business.’ Search is kind of indiscriminate in a way.”
The inference is that search is only useful as a broad entry point for lead generation. End of story. How wrong you are, Steve.
Lead generation is one use (and the one that gets the most credit) but rather than being “indiscriminate” it is actually quite targeted and remarkably flexible. Unlike a 30-second television spot for instance, I can wake up in the morning, have coffee, read a quote from someone in the ad industry, and by late morning have targeted ads running based on keywords like his company’s name and even his own name.
What’s great about this is the ability to zero in on a very specific audience (people searching for BBH, Bartle Bogle Hegarty, Steve Harty) with great speed. Kind of the opposite of “indiscriminate.”
The result of Harty’s lack of search marketing belief is evident in a quick Google search for Bartle Bogle Hegarty:
As expected there are no paid results or ads. Two BBH websites come up as number one and two but there’s no meta description – which is the equivalent of the ad copy that describes why I should care about and therefore click on this link. On the
Not taking advantage of either one is like having prime billboard space in
On the other hand I do have to commend BBH on result number 4, the opening of their office in Second Life. Unlike “indiscriminate” search marketing the no doubt costly Second Life outpost allows them to attract many real clients at their most receptive time – when they are cavorting as centaurs, elves, and flying toasters in a mostly empty virtual environment.
The results for the term “BBH” are even more discouraging:
Brown Brothers Harriman? Why is BBH getting spanked by the bank? Their heavily flash-driven site with very few text tags, no headers and no text page descriptions is one big reason. It appears that the aversion to search marketing for Harty extends even to SEO.
Search engine marketing should be a key component of a whole range of campaigns beyond lead generation. At its heart, SEM is simply another way to have a conversation. Every business is a brand that has a message to send. This is especially important when your brand, like BBH, is in the business of communicating.
In all fairness Harty’s quote and the larger approach of BBH are still not unusual in the marketing world. As part of IPG we have seen the whole gamut of responses to search marketing from marketers of all stripes, and we know that change is sometimes hard to understand and take advantage of. I firmly believe that every type of marketer today (direct response, brand, pr, etc.) needs to be in the search business to be truly effective. The future is now.
After all, your search results are tantamount to your calling card. No matter how impressive your brochure or PowerPoint presentation is every potential client, no matter the size, will run back to their office and Google you or your company after your first meeting – and some will do it in advance. Furthermore, there are also a whole slew of people who regularly do a “vanity search” on their own name. Just think how tickled a Chief Marketing Officer at a firm you’re pitching would be to do his daily search one day and see a targeted ad in his result telling him how good your firm is at what you do. This is just one example off the top of my head. Given 20 minutes I could come up with 20 more ways to creatively use paid and organic search beyond lead generation.
Search marketing does not exist in a vacuum; it is an integral part of how a company or a brand builds and shapes perceptions. Pretending it doesn’t exist or isn’t relevant as Steve Harty and many others do is to relinquish a key opportunity to let people know who you are, what you stand for, and why you do what you do. It will be interesting to see just how high this very post will rank on Google once I push the “publish” button. Will it rank in the top 3 in a search for Bartle Bogle Hegarty? How will that reflect on their brand?
Topics: Advertising: Online, Blogging, ECommerce, Google, Reprise Media, SEM: Paid Search, SEO |
Interesting post.
2 things: I wrote the Adweek article you cited; Brian wrote our cover story about how creativity is being redefined through the advent of digital technology:
http://www.adweek.com/aw/content_display/news/digital/e3i8338a3cc42d9fb02fef5c7f7fcb8fa4c
Also, Harty commented on paid search in the context of new business development. He also told me that paid search could be an effective way to lead people to agency thinking. So, he’s not anti-paid search per se; rather, he thinks it can be useful in certain contexts.
[…] Ad Agency Callout: Reprise Media to Bartle Bogle Hegarty Honcho Steve Harty -You’re Wrong About Se… […]
Kind of a pot calling the kettle black situation…you may want to tell the other folks in your network to follow your lead. Searches for “McCann”, “Universal McCann” and “Reprise” were not exactly model results.
[…] Ad Agency Callout: Reprise Media to Bartle Bogle Hegarty Honcho Steve Harty -You’re Wrong Abou…, Searchviews […]
@DB Obviously you don’t me because if you did, you’d know that I’m not bashful in criticizing my own organization or one in our network, for that matter. My point was not to criticize agencies who don’t buy their own keywords - if that were the case, I’d be criticizing > 99% of all agencies, both within and outside of Interpublic. Instead, the focus of the post was to highlight comments made by the chairman of Bartle Bogle Hegarty, because I believed represented a narrow view of the application for search engine marketing.
With respect to the comment you made about our my organization, we are very well are very well optimized for our company, Reprise Media. Furthermore, we do buy our branded terms and a handful of others. In fact, we have purchased the word you cited (“Reprise”), but after several rounds of optimization, we have purged this kw, since it is way too broad and has hurt the performance of the overall campaign.
Interesting. I would think that you would actually generate a significant amount of awareness on the word “reprise”. Many within the industry do not know the name Reprise Media. Now, I do not even try to acknowledge to know how you get leads for your business but it is interesting, however I appreciate your candor.
I personally believe that the comments by BBH are in fact, totally wrong, and I would look at leaders such as yourself to keep calling out the industry and IPG to get their act together on things like this to understand the true values of search. As soon as big agencies “get it” the better we all will be.
DB: What we found was that Reprise was such a broad and general term that it didn’t make much sense to try to rank for it, though we are top ten despite Reprise Records, the definition of the word Reprise, etc. — so far so good. Our research shows that someone looking for more information on us will almost always put in the term Reprise Media. This makes sense as very few users ever put in one-word terms anymore. The great thing about search marketing is that if we found the opposite to be true, we could rapidly shift our resources over to the term “reprise.”
[…] pong emanating from the Port Authority region we locals call “Eau de oui oui.” If you are Steve Harty you might escape to your house in the Hamptons for a little relief. My personal default setting is […]