2006 Super Bowl Search Marketing ScoreCard: Which Advertisers Made The Right Plays?
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Written By Reprise Media | February 6, 2006 | Share This
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Super Bowl XL is officially in the books. This year’s champions? The wild card, road warrior
Pittsburgh Steelers, led by a trio of stars: a young-but-clutch QB, a
retiring Hall of Famer and their chisel-jawed, heart-on-his-sleeve coach.
Now that that’s out of the way, we can get on to the really important stuff: the ads.
For the second year in a row, we missed the game because we spent the duration of the big game parked in front of
a computer screen, searching, clicking and rating to bring you our
Super Bowl Search Marketing ScoreCard.
The ScoreCard rates advertisers based on how well they use paid search best practices to harness the buzz generated
by their Super Bowl advertisement. More and more people are starting to watch TV and surf the Web at the same time,
and those people typically start their online sessions at a search engine.
We examined each advertiser’s presence closely, taking note of the keywords they chose, the language in their listings,
and the content of their landing pages.
When the dust settled and the game was over, what exactly did we find out? Let’s start with the good news:
The Champions
On the whole, advertisers still aren’t doing a great job of building on the momentum created by their TV campaigns.
At least not by our standards.
That said, there were (as always) a few notable game time performances:
CareerBuilder
Back at the top of the list for a second year was online job search company CareerBuilder.
Their ads were fun (What can I say? I’m a sucker for monkeys) and CareerBuilder made sure that anybody and everybody
who was interested got a chance to see them, ranking well for terms such as “CareerBuilder,” “job search,” and
“Super Bowl Advertiser.” A custom landing page with every
monkey commercial they’ve released thus far closed the loop.
Burger King
There was something disturbing yet brilliant about BK’s Whopperettes commercial. (Actually, the same
goes for just about all of CP&B’s work) In my opinion, Burger King’s ad was one of the most memorable ads among a fairly
thin field. Nice to see, then, that BK followed up their strong creative with an equally strong SEM campaign. Keywords
like “Whopperettes” drove traffic to a mini site where users could watch the commercial again, or even “have it your way”
with a build your own Whopperette burger. Good stuff.
The Shaggy Dog
One of the most suprising findings from’
last year’s study was that movie studios (companies that arguably live and die by buzz) seemed completely clueless on the power of search. While that trend seemed
to reiterate itself this year as well, Disney scored big points for their integration of the remake of ‘Shaggy.’ They
advertised against the title of the film, the star (Tim Allen) and even Super Bowl-related keywords to drive people to a
mini-site with video clips and stills. Simple, but effective.
Coming Up Next
There’s a lot to share - definitely more than we could make room for in one blog entry - so we’ve decided to turn this into a series. In the next entry about the Super Bowl and SEM, we’ll look at the Chumps - companies that completely missed out the opportunity to build on their buzz with search - and the Drafters - companies that didn’t advertise on the Super Bowl, but who rode the wave of interest all the same.
Can’t Wait?
You don’t have to - visit our corporate site right now and pick up a copy of the
scorecard. And while you’re there, register to recieve a copy of our upcoming whitepaper report. We’ll include detailed
critiques of each advertiser’s search campaign, an overview of best practices and an analysis of trends in the approach
that this year’s advertisers took to search marketing.
Topics: Media Convergence |
I’m more impressed with Monster which out-ranks CareerBuilder for their own keywords. They even out-rank them for “monkey ad” and “monkey commercial” using copy that pokes fun at them (”Don’t Monkey Around with Your Job Search, Find The Right Job at Monster”) - That’s clever SEO!
I completely agree - Monster’s pulling a little trick we call ‘Ad Drafting’. It’s almost like judo - using a competitor’s buzz and momentum against them. There were a few examples like this through the course of the Super Bowl that we’re planning to address in a separate post shortly.