Media Convergence
Social Media: Is Google Buzz More Than Just Hype?
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Written By Noah Mallin | February 11, 2010 | Share This
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Google has been known to launch products (hello Wave) that get a lot of initial hype but end up being curiosities at best in the hands of users. This is not to diminish the areas in which Google still holds strong - search and e-mail. So the unveiling of their new Buzz tool for Gmail users is being met with skepticism in some quarters even as it seems to hold out several promising features. Here’s the YouTube video from Google that discusses the product’s features.
Buzz is designed to allow Gmail users to tap into social media activity and updates from their existing social contacts, without leaving the popular e-mail platform.
Which Brands Scored an Integrated Touchdown at Super Bowl 44?
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Written By Anthony Iaffaldano | February 8, 2010 | Share This
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This morning, Reprise Media released our 6th annual Search Marketing Scorecard on the Super Bowl, which ranks Super Bowl advertisers based on the level of integration between their television commercials and presence in search and social media –measuring how prepared each brand was to capture the demand created by their Super Bowl advertising investment. The Search Marketing Scorecard is the longest-running study of its kind.
The audience for this year’s Super Bowl was primed and ready for integrated campaigns. According to a recent comScore study, 1/3 of the 90 million people planning to watch the Super Bowl expected to log on to their computers during the game. Furthermore, One out of every ten viewers (or nearly 9 million people) were going to use their computers specifically to seek out advertiser websites. That sounds like an audience that’s not only interested in the ads, but interested in having real interactions with brands, which is what our study is all about.
So how did this year’s advertisers do?
This year’s scorecard (which can be viewed by clicking the thumbnail to the left) saw the crowning of three rookie advertisers, as Boost Mobile, HomeAway and Google scored integrated marketing touchdowns in their first Super Bowl outing. The spots were joined in the win column by multiple-time champion E*Trade.
EDITOR’S NOTE: While it didn’t factor into the scoring in any way, it also didn’t hurt that Boost Mobile (with their Tim & Eric directed remix of the Super Bowl Shuffle) and Home Away (with the triumphant return of the Griswolds!) had two of my favorite ads of the night.
Furthermore, Denny’s, which rated a Fumble last year during their Free Grand Slam Breakfast promotion, turned in a solid performance, which bumped them up a few levels to a First and Gold advertiser - room for improvement, but a marked improvement over last year when their website crashed due to a lack of server capacity on the night of the game. (Rule #1 of cross-channel integration… make sure you can handle it if your stuff goes TRULY viral). This year, the restaurateur’s screaming chicken-related landing pages loaded quickly, pointing users to more info about the hugely successful promotion.
On the opposite side of the spectrum, PopSecret/Diamond Nuts was hard to find on the night of the Super Bowl - surprising given their pre-game promotion about using search and social to connect their campaigns. They were joined in the Fumble category by Dockers, Dodge Charger and Intel.
We also saw the return of a strategy we like to refer to as ad drafting, where companies not participating in the Super Bowl pull a judo move, buying keywords relating to their competitors and using their own energy against them. The most egregious of these drafters? Turbo Tax, who seemed to be buying every single keyword related to the Super Bowl that we could think of. They were visible for most brand names, generic super bowl keywords and more. Honorable mention goes to Pepsi (who were buying Coke related terms), and both Monster & Careerbuilder, who once again bought each others’ brand names and taglines in an effort to poach resumes and job hunters from the super bowl market.
Want to know more about the best in integrated marketing campaigns from the Super Bowl? Stay tuned to this blog over the next few days, as we dig into more of the data around our analysis to provide some useful trends and best practices. We’ll also be sharing some data from our partners at Trendrr, who provided conversation monitoring for all Super Bowl adds over the past few weeks.
And don’t forget to sign up for our upcoming Super Bowl webinar, which will be held on Feb 19th at 2pm. We’ll review all the winners and losers from this year’s Big Game, and provide analysis on what actually happened with all that buzz once users went online.
What did you think? Did you see any campaigns that you thought did a particularly good job integrating their messages cross channel?
Search Innovations: The Branding Value of a Search Impression
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Written By Emil Panzarino | June 17, 2009 | Share This
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What is the branding value of a search impression? While most search folks are trampling over and pushing aside impression data to get to the almighty click and conversion data, I ponder the question: Is there a significant branding importance associated with a search text impression?
When we think of branding within Internet marketing, we typically think of Page Takeovers, Interstitials, Page Skins, and a variety of other intimidating sounding nomenclatures.
In fact, some industry-ers scoff at the notion that search (or any text ad) could have any significant value when it comes to branding or awareness. And because the cost of impression is on a per click basis, some search planners /agencies have gone as far as removing impression data from client reporting altogether.
Advertising in a Recession: Help, My Marketing Budget Was Cut!
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Written By Noah Mallin | May 14, 2009 | Share This
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This recession-oriented post comes out of a discussion I had with some colleagues earlier in the week. The talk was prompted by the story that as part of their government backed bankruptcy the Obama administration has cut Chrysler’s marketing budget in half. For marketers like us, that’s like watching a limb get severed. Still, whether government mandated or not, it’s a reality that many businesses are scaling back on advertising and marketing just when they need it the most.
Search News: Super Bowl Scorecard – Getting Drafty
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Written By Anthony Iaffaldano | February 5, 2009 | Share This
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Our continued coverage of our Fifth Annual Search Marketing Scorecard, looking at Super Bowl advertisers to see how well they integrated their TV spots with search and social media, brings us to a little something the cool kids like to call “ad drafting.” “Was ist das?”you might ask, were you German.
The concept of ad drafting comes from the ancient practice of drafting as perfected on NASCAR Ovals across the country in which a driver in a slower car uses the slipstream of faster competitors to slingshot ahead of them. Paid search advertisers can play a similar game, using key words and phrases from another’s campaign to capitalize on buzz and slingshot themselves into the top search results listings.
The Burger School of Drafting
In school I learned about why McDonald’s and Burger King tried to build their stores as close to each other as possible in a centralized population location. The thinking was that people are lazy and are likely to go to the place closest to them when given the option of two outlets selling essentially the same thing. Setting up shop next to each other was a way to maximize sales for both stores within their given radius.
Search News: Super Bowl Scorecard – Brands That Fumbled
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Written By Anthony Iaffaldano | February 4, 2009 | Share This
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We’re continuing our coverage of our Fifth Annual Search Marketing Scorecard, which looks at how well advertisers 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 their mirror opposites in our Fumble category – brands that blew their opportunity to integrate their Super Bowl TV spots with their search and social media marketing.
The Hall of Shame
Just as our study has produced some Hall of Famer’s - brands that have consistently integrated their campaigns across channels - there are some brands that seem to always let the ball slip through their fingers. Coca-Cola’s ad featuring insects conspiring to spirit away a bottle of soda was whimsical, and rated well in the USA Today AdMeter but when it came to tying it in with the brand’s presence online the results were quite poor. The tag line was “Open Happiness” but good luck finding the ad if you search for it. There is no paid search against the term and no social media pages set up for it.
Search News: Super Bowl Scorecard - What’s the Lifecycle of Your Ad?
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Written By Anthony Iaffaldano | February 2, 2009 | Share This
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This year’s Reprise Media Super Bowl Scorecard is out - after all our prep and numbers crunching it’s nice to send our baby out in the world, redfaced and wailing. Oh yeah, and there was some kind of football game that kept interrupting the ads.
One thing I noticed was that for a number of the brands in our top “Touchdown” category, search and social media were used to really extend the lifetime of the ads. Our top ranked brand, E-Trade, had “outtakes” with those mischievous babies acting quite naughty. These were linked up with their paid search campaign well in advance of Super Bowl Sunday. It’s a measure of the quality of these that not once did I think “Where’s John Travolta and Kirstie Alley?” Until now.
The ad on game night drove folks back to their website and to search where even if they typed in realted phrases like “talking babies” they were served up an ad that linked back to an E-Trade landing site (and not thankfully to the Wayan’s Brothers film Little Man.)
Search News: Can We All Just Agree that Google is a Media Company?
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Written By Noah Mallin | January 29, 2009 | Share This
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The news today that the William Morris Agency is close to a content development deal with Google’s YouTube video channel ought to put a final stake through the heart of the idea that Google is a technology company. Oh yes, they use technology as a means to an end but ultimately they are providers of content, and of advertising opportunities against that content.
Nor is Google an advertising agency, despite claims to the contrary from time to time. They may serve up tools that traditionally were provided by agencies to clients but they are aimed at smaller advertisers who are unlikely to go the agency route.
Search News: Advertisers Set Online Table for Super Bowl
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Written By Noah Mallin | January 28, 2009 | Share This
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As most sentient beings and readers of this blog know by now, next Sunday is the Super Bowl in which a bunch of guys in shoulder pads will toss each other around like a classic catfight from 80s TV staple Dynasty (fast forward past the yippety-yap to 1:55 to get a taste of this year’s gameplay. The Steelers are in blonde. ) Europeans, South Americans and Africans – don’t be fooled. This isn’t the dignified noble game of football that you all cherish.
Let’s face facts: there is a substantial subset of the population that could give two figs about the game – we want to watch the ads! This is America’s biggest ad event, bigger even than the Presidential Inauguration.
It comes as no surprise then that advertising reporters are swarming around the pre-game ad stories. What seems to be different this year is the widespread acknowledgment that TV marketing doesn’t end at the edge of the screen.
Super Bowl Advertising: 5th Annual Search Marketing Scorecard Rates the MVP’s
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Written By Noah Mallin | January 26, 2009 | Share This
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The late, great comedian George Carlin had a routine that delineated the many differences between baseball and football as games and culture. One of his observations is that baseball is a 19th century pastoral game whereas football is a 20th century technological struggle. Much the same could be said about Super Bowl advertising – though as we burrow ever deeper into the 21st century it’s time for us to drop those 20th century advances (Claymation! Frogs! Celebrity endorsements!) and move onto the new tech.
That’s why for the last 4 years Reprise Media has been issuing our Super Bowl Search Marketing Scorecard. The Scorecard measures how well Super Bowl advertisers are leveraging their fancy-shmancy expensive TV ads with their online marketing efforts. Here’s last year’s Scorecard to help you get the gist.
This year the Scorecard will be released February 2nd, natch, as the game is on the 1st. Here are some of the key questions we expect to be able to answer this year: