Mazda Taps Into Pontiac TV & Search Ads Again
Remember the
post earlier about Pontiac telling people to search for them on Google? What
I loved especially about that was it reminded me of Gregory Markel over at
Infuse Creative telling me how he
helped Pontiac-competitor Mazda drive a benefit off a similar campaign that
Pontiac did with Yahoo last year. Now history repeats once again.
Last year on The Apprentice, Pontiac used a programming tie-in to tell people
to look them up on Yahoo, where Yahoo had inserted some type of Yahoo
Shortcut-style link.
Gregory noticed this link came below the sponsored search results — and if I
recall correctly, Pontiac hadn’t bought any of those. So he got Mazda into that
space. For a few thousand dollars, he tapped into traffic from a product
placement set-up that cost over a million, if I recall. He’s actually got an
awesome little video I want him to show publicly that explains it all very well
with voiceovers, music and images.
Today, John Battelle
notes that Mazda has bought a sponsored link on Google to come up for those
Pontiac-driven searches.
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Mazda’s bought Yahoo, as well
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Andrew Goodman breaks down the comparative advertising campaign more
here. Meanwhile, self-confessed data geek Bill Tancer over at Hitwise
couldn’t resist looking at traffic to the Pontiac site over time. You can see
how the TV mentions to check Yahoo last year and Google this year drove traffic
to Pontiac. He also shows how the site that received the most “pontiac” searches
on search engines after Pontiac was — yep, Mazda.
All this brings me back to something that came up at our
Future Of Search
Engine Marketing panel at SES Chicago last month. While several of the
search marketers said that they were getting money formerly devoted to TV, none
of them wanted TV spending to be cut entirely. TV drives search traffic, which
in turn helps them.
That got me to wonder/observe to the audience if we’ll see a change coming
over the next year or so. Instead of people wondering how search can tie into
other campaigns, maybe we’ll see search become the primary target of a campaign.
In other words, Pontiac someday might plan to do a big search buy and want to
ensure they drive traffic to support that — so television, radio, outdoors will
all be purchases to push search.