IndustryCoke Counters Bad PR With Search Ads

Coke Counters Bad PR With Search Ads


Coca-Cola Counters Critics With Search Ads
from MediaPost covers how Coke is
using search marketing to get the word out about a court victory where it was
accused by a Colombian trade union of intimidating and assassinating union
leaders.

A search for coke
on Google, for example, brings up the
Killer Coke
site ranked third, which covers the allegations. Now Coke is
fighting back against that — sort of. A search for
killer coke
brings up this ad:



Coke Lawsuit Dismissed

Suit against Coca-Cola bottlers
in Colombia dismissed. Read more.
www.coca-cola.com/presscenter

That leads to more information about the victory from Coke, right alongside
the "anti" natural search result that appears, like this:


Anti-Coke Natural Result & Pro-Coke Search Ad

But c’mon. This is Coke being savvy? A regular search for
coke on Google
doesn’t carry this ad. That means plenty of people are seeing the Killer Coke
site ranking well but not getting a counter message from Coke itself.

Perhaps it is an oversight, though it might be intentional — trying to
target those specifically searching for "killer coke" with a positive message
without trying to be too in the face of those doing regular searches who might
not know about the allegations.

Curious, I checked out the

trend
of searches for killer coke versus coke on Google Trends. As you can
see, practically no one is searching for "killer coke:"


Killer Coke Versus Coke Trend

Overall, if Coke thinks spreading the word is important, I’d have gone with
an ad targeted to Coke as well. Then again, since the company already has three
different ads running for its My Coke Rewards program, the main Coca Cola site
and the official Coca Cola store, maybe it felt a fourth ad would finally trip
Google’s

rules against
multiple ads from the same company:

To provide the best possible experience for our users and advertisers,
Google does not permit multiple ads from the same or affiliated company or
person to appear on the same results page. We believe that pages with multiple
ads from the same company provide less relevant results and a lower quality
experience for our users. Over time, multiple ads from the same source also
reduce advertiser performance and lower their return on investment.

Of course, Coke does seem to meet the exception to this rule:

  • The destination site for each ad offers different products or services
    (for example, a large manufacturer with two product sites, one solely for
    stereos and one solely for computers, both running on keyword ‘electronics’).
  • Each destination site has a different layout and design, and each URL and
    domain is different.

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