Online Video
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?
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.
Update: Domino’s Takes Our Advice – Too Late to Fight Social Media Slosh?
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Written By Noah Mallin | April 16, 2009 | Share This
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I expect our payment from Domino’s any day now, though I won’t be so churlish as to hold them to their own 30 minutes-or-less delivery guarantee. However, that pledge of swift action should have rang more true for a company that’s been forced into an embrace of the social media bullhorn and now has to play catch up with a story that’s still moving.
Domino’s did take the advice I gave them two days ago here on SearchViews – they made a YouTube video detailing their response to the two errant employees who posted footage of some naughty sandwich-making at a local Domino’s restaurant. Unfortunately by the time they had all their new social media profiles set up on sites like Twitter and uploaded their video to YouTube, the original story had time to go truly viral.
Search News: Getting Kosmix Intervention Through The Holy Trinity of Search
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Written By Noah Mallin | March 19, 2009 | Share This
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I was pretty harsh on new search engine Kosmix’s chances at whupping Google’s butt in yesterday’s post, and I don’t take back any of those conclusions even as I have continued to play around with the engine myself. Ultimately Kosmix has come to reinforce my sense that the best search campaigns are the ones that use all three of what I like to call the holy trinity: Paid search, SEO, and social media.
What sparked this thought was seeing how the Kosmix results page shuffles things around and surfaces stuff that would get knocked to a different page on Google.
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.
Link Sharing: Digg Finds it Harder to Win Friends, Influence People in Social Media
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Written By Noah Mallin | January 22, 2009 | Share This
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The idea behind Digg is simplicity itself – read an article or post online, like it, let other people know so they can vote on it and watch everyone’s page views skyrocket. The reality has turned out to be a test case in how a social media platform can turn sour. For marketers and others who want to promote content, it may already be time to pack it up and move on to a new platform.
We did some Digg promotion in the past for SearchViews but the number of people required to get anything to really go viral never equaled the effort we had to put in. Recently a colleague asked me why I don’t do more Digg promotion of posts again and I simply said, “Why bother.”
Search Engines: Hold Your Vertical – Please!
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Written By Noah Mallin | January 6, 2009 | Share This
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Today, the so-called “conversation search engine” Artiklz was launched in beta form. Judging from it’s name and the copy on their landing page it was developed by a group of rogue LOLcats. As usual, us search geeks will play around with it, turn up our noses, and leave it on the trash heap along with Cuil and every other new search engine launched in the last several years. Dismissive much? Oh yeah. Why? Glad you asked.
Search News: YouTube Tests Embeddable Search Bar – Can Ads be Far Behind?
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Written By Noah Mallin | November 14, 2008 | Share This
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I think I have mentioned Google’s incredible …um…testiness before. They love to try out new ideas before sending them into perpetual beta (hello Gmail) or actually launching them as real offerings. This has been less evident over at Google-owned YouTube — though with all of the fretting over making their investment back it’s only a matter of time before they begin to randomly beam “Chocolate Rain” into people’s cerebellums. Just to test the technology out.
This morning came word via eagle-eyed Anthony Iaffaldano, Reprise Media Marketing Director, that YouTube had actually sprung a little test action on his watch. While embedding a video on a totally non-geeky message board he was surprised to find that his embedded clip came with a search toolbar:
Search News: As More Eyes Turn to Alternate Vid Sites, blinkx May Finally Come Into its Own
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Written By Noah Mallin | November 13, 2008 | Share This
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Blinkx has been around for quite some time now – since 2004 to be exact – and their image-based search algorithm has always held promise. As they describe it:
“Unlike other multimedia search engines that attempt to re-purpose technology built for the Text Web, blinkx uses a unique combination of patented conceptual search, speech recognition and video analysis software to efficiently, automatically and accurately find and qualify online video.”
Which is great except Google and others are pursuing similar technology and Google in particular has the deep pockets to outdo anyone’s search algorithm. Ultimately blinkx will have to do more than just roll out a better level of search technology to become a challenger to YouTube or universal search on Google.
Search News: How Election 08 Became a Boon to Key Online Platforms – The Final Post (We Mean it!) on the Election
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Written By Noah Mallin | November 7, 2008 | Share This
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The election is over, which means many of us will have to go back to obsessing about other stuff – the economy, fantasy sports leagues, Neko Case- whatever floats your boat. Still, in reviewing the last two years of what has surely been the most exciting and fascinating election of a lifetime it’s worth noting not just the impact of online platforms on the election – on which much has and will be written. The inverse effect has been less noted - the fact that the elction also impacted the platforms that exists online.
So what was the impact of the election on online platforms?
Minimal. Hah, just kidding. In fact it was quite substantial and fascinating to see: