Strong piece by Janel Landis, a director of search marketing at Florida-based multi-channel marketing agency,
Sendtec.com, on search and DRTV. She drives home how important it is to balance TV advertising with search engine marketing (SEM), that is, to make sure that when people collapse in front of the Dell...
... an hour or two after seeing your prime time TV spot promoting a limited edition credit card with a piccie of HM The Queen walking her dogs on it, your site comes up when they stare into space, scratch their heads, and tap into Google word combos like 'her majesty's credit', 'regal plastic' and 'corgi card'. If it does, then you've got the integration of on- and offline down to a T.
Janel zooms in on a number of big companies who successfully integrated SEM and TV advertising during the recent 2007 Primetime EMMY Awards, and those who made a complete mess of it — or who, worse still, overlooked it altogether. Like Yo-Plus.
Yo-Plus is a new yogurt from Yoplait, introduced to compete with Dannon Activia. Astoundingly, Janel observes, while the Yo-Plus commercial featured a website, 'there was zero presence for the site on searches (neither paid nor organic) for 'yogurt'. More importantly, the No.1 paid listing and the No.2 organic listing in the results for 'yogurt' on Google were Dannon and its Activia brand. Dannon was prepared to cannibalize the volume that Yoplait so generously produced. Dannon thanks you, Yoplait!'
So, Yoplai spend hundreds of thousands, probably millions on a TV ad and slot, but doesn't even think about bidding on a few pretty obvious keywords that people are going to google.
The company with the best integrated campaign during the Emmys, says Janel, was broadband provider, Verizon FiOS. Once again, the advertiser ran the URL in the spot, although this time had the gumption to go out and spend big on keywords like 'fiberoptic network' and 'fios'. For Verizon, basic SEM like this was obvious, but for other companies, it's still — surprisingly — not.