Our continued coverage of our Fifth Annual Search Marketing Scorecard, looking at Super Bowl advertisers to see how well they integrated their TV spots with search and social media, brings us to a little something the cool kids like to call “ad drafting.” “Was ist das?”you might ask, were you German.
The concept of ad drafting comes from the ancient practice of drafting as perfected on NASCAR Ovals across the country in which a driver in a slower car uses the slipstream of faster competitors to slingshot ahead of them. Paid search advertisers can play a similar game, using key words and phrases from another’s campaign to capitalize on buzz and slingshot themselves into the top search results listings.
The Burger School of Drafting
In school I learned about why McDonald’s and Burger King tried to build their stores as close to each other as possible in a centralized population location. The thinking was that people are lazy and are likely to go to the place closest to them when given the option of two outlets selling essentially the same thing. Setting up shop next to each other was a way to maximize sales for both stores within their given radius.
This lesson was not lost on two of our Super Bowl advertisers who happen to compete in the same brand space. Monster.com and Careerbuilder.com are both career sites that are seeing a boom during this time of troubles. They both ran Super Bowl ads with catchy taglines – CareerBuilder’s “Start Building” and Monster’s “Your Calling is Calling.” And they both ran paid search ads using each OTHER’s taglines (in pic below, Monster’s is on top, Careerbuilder’s is on the right.)
It’s always possible that the searcher’s mouse will stray from the top link to the side link. You’re looking for jobs right? A burger is a burger.
Interestingly enough, Monster did this to Careerbuilder.com last year, and they weren’t even a Super Bowl advertiser (see below for another example of this.) Finally, grasshopper has surpassed Master.
Drafting in Mono
Then there are the smaller drafters who don’t have the 3 million bucks plus to spend on Super Bowl night. Instead, why not spend a fraction of that dipping into the pool of searchers driven to the search engines by Senor Deep Pockets?
Cash4Gold was a prime example of this. This year was their first Super Bowl ad and they did a great job, landing in our top Touchdown category. Their competitors, including goldfellow.com and wildforgold.com, decided to get a slice of Csah4Gold’s success and bought search ads based on keywords related to the C4G commercial including “cash4gold” “MC Hammer” (one of the Cash4Gold spokespeople) and even “Super bowl ad.”
Where Cash4Gold – with search, social media, and TV ads – was running in surround sound, its competitors may have peeled off a sliver of their traffic by drafting off interest in one channel – search. Mono, if you will.
Drafting is only one technique in the arsenal of integrated marketing. If you want to find out about best practices in integrating TV, search and social media marketing using great examples from this year’s Super Bowl, register today for our webinar to be held Wednesday, February 11thGoing for the Extra Point: Integrated Marketing Lessons To Be Learned From The Super Bowl. at 2PM ET
Among the topics we will cover:
• How marketing buzz translates into online activity
• The website traffic impact of integrating your marketing campaigns
• Examples of the best examples of integrated marketing from the Big Game
• Tips for immediately increasing the overall impact of your marketing efforts
