An interesting quote from Peter Sealey, former Coca-Cola CMO, on paid search as reported by Miguel Helft at the New York Times:

“Search is great, but you can’t advertise Coca-Cola in search.”

Danny Sullivan brought this to our attention over Twitter. Now, while the context of the article is how Google is the winner in this Microsoft-Yahoo standoff (there’s no escaping that story, is there) it’s just difficult to overlook a statement like that. I mean, search connects brands with concepts – is there anything more central to Coca-Cola’s marketing than this? A quick search confirms that Coke’s current management believes this as well – paid search ads for MyCokeRewards.com and the Coca-Cola Store show up on Google when you search for the brand name. Furthermore, the first page of results is dominated by Coke-branded pages including Coca-Cola.com, DietCoke.com, theCoca-ColaCompany.com, and Music.Coca-cola.com. Why does that make a difference? The brand’s presence is so broad that Coke’s presence is pushing potentially inflammatory websites off the first page, such as KillerCoke.org, a website that outlines the torture and killings of union leaders at Coca-Cola bottling plants in Colombia.

No wonder Peter is the former CMO of Coke.

Really, this is just more evidence that CPG companies don’t understand search and online advertising, as we mentioned last week.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 6th, 2008 at 11:14 am and is filed under Advertising: Online, Search: How-To. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.