Search News: Super Bowl Scorecard – Behind The Winners
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Written By Anthony Iaffaldano | February 3, 2009 | Share This
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Now that the dust has settled and Pittsburghers have had their parade, we can dig into just who the big winners are in this year’s Reprise Media Search Marketing Scorecard were and more precisely – why?
E-Trade’s Touchdown
We touched a little bit on overall Touchdown winner E-Trade yesterday but it’s worth going more in depth about what they did right. Their story is all the more notable for having come up short last year by failing to integrate their search strategy with what they were doing on television.
Not so, this year. E-Trade’s unified approach flawlessly tied paid search, social media, SEO and television into an integrated marketing juggernaut.
To begin with, they began building interest in the weeks leading up to the game with “outtakes” of their talking baby ads on a special E-Trade landing page with plenty of great content and social media links – to Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. They also made sure that their video content was easily and fully shareable.
On game night the commercial included a call to action and a URL to drive people back to their site. What if Super Bowl viewers missed this? No matter – a search for “E-Trade” or even “talking babies” took you where you needed to go.
Hall of Famers
We also had some Hall of famers, two four-time touchdown stars who continued to make it look easy to score during the game. CareerBuilder.com and GoDaddy both get integrated marketing - they’ve proven that year after year.
GoDaddy regularly gets heat for ads that some may consider tasteless but they clearly work – and drive interest offline and online. By running a contest on their website to choose which ad they would show during the game (which ended up with them showing both ads) they were able to build excitement, abetted by the ever colorful blog of company founder Bob Parsons. The promise of “Uncensored Content” likely drove hordes of basement dwelling technophiles – their core demo – to the GoDaddy site in hopes (soon to be dashed) of seeing more of Danica Patrick.
CareerBuilder.com was also out there with their new ads way in advance – touting a 60 second version of what would air in 30 second format. CareerBuilder did a great job integrating with social media especially – sending users to a branded YouTube channel and including links to their brilliant Anonymous Tip Giver which allows you to send an e-mail to a co-worker with a helpful tip ( Gum is the perfect segue between a tuna sandwich and a job interview is one of the pre-loaded choices).
Winning – With a Caveat
Pepsi has done well in the past and they did so again this year with their Refresh Everything Ad.. They did most of the things our other winners did, and did it well. The only problem? They focused their integration on only one search engine – Yahoo. Yahoo and Pepsi have worked together for much of the last decade but does Yahoo’s increasingly older demographic still benefit Pepsi in reaching their young target consumers? Even more important, Google’s dominance is so overwhelming when it comes to search engines that it has to be asked whether not appearing on Google is akin to not having run search advertisements at all. Pepsi still did well by our criteria because they were fully integrated – blending excellent social media work with paid search and television. By limiting themselves to an also-ran search engine though, they may have diminished the real world utility of much of their work on Super Bowl night.
For all of our winners, great marketing integration between search, social media and television means that their pricey Super Bowl spends – from costly television production to the $3 million media buy – was put to double and triple duty. They all got the most bang for their marketing buck and in this time of economic uncertainty there are few things guaranteed to put a bigger smile on an advertiser’s face.
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Topics: Advertising: Offline, Advertising: Online, Reprise Media, SEM: Paid Search, SEO, Search Marketing Scorecard, Search: News, Social Media, Twitter, Yahoo!, YouTube |
[…] on this year’s Super Bowl broadcast integrated their search engine and social media marketing. Yesterday we pointed to Touchdowns… the brands that made into our top tier. As you might expect, those Touchdown scoring brands have […]