Unlike the USAToday AdMeter, YouTube’s AdBlitz or most other Super Bowl ad rankings, we focus on just about everything relating to a marketer’s campaign OTHER than the quality of their creative.

Instead, our Scorecard ranks Super Bowl advertisers based on their visibility in search and social media immediately after their TV spots aired. Essentially, we’re evaluating the steps each brand took to capture the demand created by their Super Bowl advertising investment.

So what were some of the biggest takeaways from the big game?

No Rookie Mistakes Here: Among the top-rated brands in our scorecard were three first-time Super Bowl advertisers – Boost Mobile, HomeAway and Google. All three brands turned compelling TV ads into meaningful online experiences. The brands were highly visible across the major search engines, and met interested consumers’ interest with content that easily extended the value of their TV commercials.

Advertising – Now With More Tailgating!: As any football fan will tell you, one of the best parts of going to a game isn’t the game itself, but the party leading up to it. So why should it be any different for the advertisers? 37% of the advertisers in this year’s game launched initiatives weeks and, in some cases, even months before the Super Bowl, building buzz and anticipation for their spots.

This is a significant shift in the way brands view the big game, one that’s taken place over the last few years. Super Bowl Sunday used to be about the big reveal – new spots were guarded more carefully than the president’s nuclear football. But in the age of social media, brands are finding benefits in opening the kimono a little early, not only showing consumers what they’re in for, but actually giving them the playbook and letting them lead the drive. The best example? Doritos’ incredibly successful Crash the Super Bowl promotion, which let consumers develop (and promote) their own spots, with the top three getting Super Bowl airtime. This not only cut down on Doritos’ production budget, but gave them an army of marketers all jockeying to earn :30 of worldwide fame.

Where’s the Brand Investment?: For the first time in five years, we saw a significant decrease in the number of companies visible in paid search for their brand names. (63% down from a high of 70%). While marketers have often struggled with the question of whether or not to buy their brand on search engines, it should be a no-brainer on Super Sunday. Only paid search offers the ability to control the message shows to consumers, allowing better integration with a short-term promotion like, say, the Super Bowl. This was most certainly a trend we expected to see heading in the other direction.

Social Took a Back Seat: Many pundits (including the one on the other end of this keyboard) expected this year’s Super Bowl to act as a coming out party of sorts in the way that mainstream marketers used social media during the game. We expected brands to end every commercial with breathless pleas to “Fan us on Facebook!” or “Follow us on Twitter!” We expected those channels to be literally buzzing at game time, with special offers for consumers, and for brands to loosen their controls and engage in real conversations with their customers.

And what did we get?

Well, to be fair, there were a few marketers thinking outside the box – For instance, Google drove viewers directly to YouTube, and E*Trade included Facebook & YouTube widgets on the end card of their commercial. Unfortunately, for most of the field, it was more of the same. 91% of the 57 brands we tracked had a presence on at least one of Facebook, YouTube or Twitter, but the conversation on those channels was fairly typical and one-sided: “Hey everybody, watch our ads! We’re proud of them!” Still plenty room for improvement.

No Commercial? No Problem! – There are only so many brands with $2.5 million sitting around to spend on a Super Bowl spot, but the buzz and interest generated by those spots isn’t only the domain of Big Game advertisers. Take tax prep-software TurboTax – given the timing of the Super Bowl, they knew that the Super Bowl would drive millions of people to the search box looking for information relating to the game, players, halftime performers and advertisers.

As a result, the company was extremely aggressive in paid search, with a campaign reminding consumers of the benefits of their package. While they didn’t explicitly say the words Super Bowl or even football, the landing page had football personality Chris Berman and a “tax coach of the year” trophy that looks awfully familiar.

In all, a savvy move to build awareness for their service in an unobtrusive (albeit not entirely relevant) way.

Want even more information about how brands fared in this year’s cross-channel marketing showdown? Register today to reserve your place at Reprise Media’s annual Super Bowl webinar, which will be held next Friday, February 19th at 2PM EST.

Among the topics we’ll cover:
• An in-depth look at the winners and losers in search and social media buzz
• Innovative tactics for tapping into the post-bowl surge in interest
• Potential pitfalls that could keep your brand on the bench

The audience for this year’s Super Bowl was primed and ready for integrated campaigns. According to a recent comScore study, 1/3 of the 90 million people planning to watch the Super Bowl expected to log on to their computers during the game. Furthermore, One out of every ten viewers (or nearly 9 million people) were going to use their computers specifically to seek out advertiser websites. That sounds like an audience that’s not only interested in the ads, but interested in having real interactions with brands, which is what our study is all about.

So how did this year’s advertisers do?

This year’s scorecard (which can be viewed by clicking the thumbnail to the left) saw the crowning of three rookie advertisers, as Boost Mobile, HomeAway and Google scored integrated marketing touchdowns in their first Super Bowl outing. The spots were joined in the win column by multiple-time champion E*Trade.

EDITOR’S NOTE: While it didn’t factor into the scoring in any way, it also didn’t hurt that Boost Mobile (with their Tim & Eric directed remix of the Super Bowl Shuffle) and Home Away (with the triumphant return of the Griswolds!) had two of my favorite ads of the night.

Furthermore, Denny’s, which rated a Fumble last year during their Free Grand Slam Breakfast promotion, turned in a solid performance, which bumped them up a few levels to a First and Gold advertiser – room for improvement, but a marked improvement over last year when their website crashed due to a lack of server capacity on the night of the game. (Rule #1 of cross-channel integration… make sure you can handle it if your stuff goes TRULY viral). This year, the restaurateur’s screaming chicken-related landing pages loaded quickly, pointing users to more info about the hugely successful promotion.

On the opposite side of the spectrum, PopSecret/Diamond Nuts was hard to find on the night of the Super Bowl – surprising given their pre-game promotion about using search and social to connect their campaigns. They were joined in the Fumble category by Dockers, Dodge Charger and Intel.

We also saw the return of a strategy we like to refer to as ad drafting, where companies not participating in the Super Bowl pull a judo move, buying keywords relating to their competitors and using their own energy against them. The most egregious of these drafters? Turbo Tax, who seemed to be buying every single keyword related to the Super Bowl that we could think of. They were visible for most brand names, generic super bowl keywords and more. Honorable mention goes to Pepsi (who were buying Coke related terms), and both Monster & Careerbuilder, who once again bought each others’ brand names and taglines in an effort to poach resumes and job hunters from the super bowl market.

Want to know more about the best in integrated marketing campaigns from the Super Bowl? Stay tuned to this blog over the next few days, as we dig into more of the data around our analysis to provide some useful trends and best practices. We’ll also be sharing some data from our partners at Trendrr, who provided conversation monitoring for all Super Bowl adds over the past few weeks.

And don’t forget to sign up for our upcoming Super Bowl webinar, which will be held on Feb 19th at 2pm. We’ll review all the winners and losers from this year’s Big Game, and provide analysis on what actually happened with all that buzz once users went online.

What did you think? Did you see any campaigns that you thought did a particularly good job integrating their messages cross channel?

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

The Hall of Shame

Just as our study has produced some Hall of Famer’s – brands that have consistently  integrated their campaigns across channels – there are some brands that seem to always let the ball slip through their fingers.  Coca-Cola’s ad featuring insects conspiring to spirit away a bottle of soda was whimsical, and rated well in the USA Today AdMeter but when it came to tying it in with the brand’s presence online the results were quite poor. The tag line was “Open Happiness” but good luck finding the ad if you search for it. There is no paid search against the term and no social media pages set up for it.

Correction- there is an organic link titled Happiness Factory 3 that comes up first in most searches that does take you to behind the scenes info on the spot and the music. It’s a neat site but who would know that they are connected? Not the casual searcher surely. Yeah and don’t bother looking for it in Coca-Cola’s official YouTube channel – it’s not there.

Coke has done progressively worse over the last three years of our study, truly entering the Hall of Scorecard Shame.

Let’s Tie One On… I Mean In

Beer ads are practically synonymous with the Super Bowl, but they haven’t been eligible due to the fact that the major search engines have a ban on alcoholic beverage ads. Until now. Google lifted their ban (link to story?) well in advance of the Super Bowl. The response from Heineken, Budweiser, Bud Light?  Nada, zip, zero.

Ironically one beer maker did make an effort to rise their foamy head to the occasion – Miller High Life garnered plenty of press and social media for their “One-Second Spot” campaign. The campaign, and the social media tie-ins – revolve around the $3 million cost of a full 30-second ad which Miller proposes to skirt by airing a series of 1-second spots.  Unfortunately NBC turned down the buy which meant that Miller had to buy local in selected markets – missing out on our national ad criteria.

This is a shame as the other beer companies could learn from Miller’s lesson – search ads (which are still up) leading to a dedicated landing page, embeddable social media content and a great overarching idea that ties in the brand values and the game.  We’ll know next year whether Miller High Life is a trailblazing outlier or a blip on the radar.

Integration Means Preparation

About the only thing that went right for Denny’s was that they had paid search going and they aired an ad with a great offer (free breakfast!) during the game. They were killed by the fact that they couldn’t keep their website up and running. We had one computer that was only able to get 15% of the site loaded by the end of the fourth quarter.

In light of this perhaps it’s understandable that the TV spots had no URL and no suggestion that people do what comes naturally – go to Denny’s website to find the store nearest them. People did it anyway and the result wasn’t pretty. On Monday, when these free breakfasts were actually served up, lo and behold: the site crashed again.

It’s a basic rule of thumb If you have a great offer and you are going to use paid search ads  to drive traffic to it – you need to be prepared for the surge in site traffic.  Denny’s was so close to getting it right but even if they had, say, done more to spread assets and interest with social media, without a loadable website the efforts landed them squarely in the Fumble category.

Even the Worst are Better

Though there were exceptions, many of our cellar dwellers at least attempted some form of integration.  Some of the brands that ranked in the middle this year would have been touchdowns when we first started the survey.

The good news is that every year the bar is raised, with more brands understanding that integrating your TV spots with your paid and organic search efforts and social media outreach gives you the best return on the Super Bowl ad investment.  While best practices are still far from universal, it’s nice to see that last year’s plateau was merely a pause in the continued adoption of marketing integration:

Interested in following all of our Scorecard news? Check us out on Twitter at @scorecard .

E-Trade’s Touchdown

We touched a little bit on overall Touchdown winner E-Trade yesterday but it’s worth going more in depth about what they did right. Their story is all the more notable for having come up short last year by failing to integrate their search strategy with what they were doing on television.

Not so, this year. E-Trade’s unified approach flawlessly tied paid search, social media, SEO and television into an integrated marketing juggernaut.

To begin with, they began building interest in the weeks leading up to the game with “outtakes” of their talking baby ads on a special E-Trade landing page with plenty of great content and social media links – to Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. They also made sure that their video content was easily and fully shareable.

On game night the commercial included a call to action and a URL to drive people back to their site. What if Super Bowl viewers missed this? No matter – a search for “E-Trade” or even “talking babies” took you where you needed to go.

Hall of Famers

We also had some Hall of famers, two four-time touchdown stars who continued to make it look easy to score during the game. CareerBuilder.com and GoDaddy both get integrated marketing – they’ve proven that year after year.

GoDaddy regularly gets heat for ads that some may consider tasteless but they clearly work – and drive interest offline and online. By running a contest on their website to choose which ad they would show during the game (which ended up with them showing both ads) they were able to build excitement, abetted by the ever colorful blog of company founder Bob Parsons.  The promise of “Uncensored Content” likely drove hordes of basement dwelling technophiles – their core demo – to the GoDaddy site in hopes (soon to be dashed) of seeing more of Danica Patrick.

CareerBuilder.com was also out there with their new ads way in advance – touting a 60 second version of what would air in 30 second format.  CareerBuilder did a great job integrating with social media especially – sending users to a branded YouTube channel and including links to their brilliant Anonymous Tip Giver which allows you to send an e-mail to a co-worker with a helpful tip ( Gum is the perfect segue between a tuna sandwich and a job interview is one of the pre-loaded choices).

Winning – With a Caveat

Pepsi has done well in the past and they did so again this year with their Refresh Everything  Ad.. They did most of the things our other winners did, and did it well. The only problem?  They  focused their integration on only one search engine – Yahoo. Yahoo and Pepsi have worked together for much of the last decade but does Yahoo’s increasingly older demographic still benefit Pepsi in reaching their young target consumers? Even more important, Google’s dominance is so overwhelming when it comes to search engines that it has to be asked whether not appearing on Google is akin to not having run search advertisements at all. Pepsi still did well by our criteria because they were fully integrated – blending excellent social media work with paid search and television. By limiting themselves to an also-ran search engine though, they may have diminished the real world utility of much of their work on Super Bowl night.

For all of our winners, great marketing integration between search, social media and television means that their pricey Super Bowl spends – from costly television production to the $3 million media buy – was put to double and triple duty. They all got the most bang for their marketing buck and in this time of economic uncertainty there are few things guaranteed to put a bigger smile on an advertiser’s face.

Want more Scorecard news as it happens? Follow us on Twitter at @scorecard

One thing I noticed was that for a number of the brands in our top “Touchdown” category, search and social media were used to really extend the lifetime of the ads. Our top ranked brand, E-Trade, had “outtakes” with those mischievous babies acting quite naughty. These were  linked up with their paid search campaign well in advance of Super Bowl Sunday. It’s a measure of the quality of these that not once did I think “Where’s John Travolta and Kirstie Alley?” Until now.

The ad on game night drove folks back to their website and to search where even if they typed in realted phrases like “talking babies” they were served up an ad that linked back to an E-Trade landing site (and not thankfully to the Wayan’s Brothers film Little Man.)

The paid search ads linked to the Super Bowl spots have continued, leading users to the ads which are embedded on YouTube, and even to the baby’s Twitter account on the same landing page – ironically one place where they failed to make a full impact. That lazy baby only Tweeted five times before the game though it’s picked up a bit lately. No time for naps in social media!

On the other hand Super Bowl advertiser Sobe (of the 3-d glasses and psychedelic lizards dancing) was (and continues to be)  much more active on their Twitter feed, with a great deal of interaction with other Twitter users. Pepsi too got into the Twitter act, with an account dedicted to Pepsuber, their re-configuring of Saturday Night Live‘s MacGyver parody. All of the Tweeting added to the many brands who sent people to dedicated Facebook and YouTube pages adds up to interaction that extends well beyond the 30 second lifetime of the ad.

GoDaddy.com, a perennial favorite in  the Scorecard, engaged people online by having a contest to choose which of their ads was the best (they ran them both anyone.) The ads themselves drove people back online during the game with promises of “uncensored content” – which while upping the tastelessness quotient were probably a bit shy of what 12 year-old boys were hoping for.

So why does extending an ad’s lifecycle matter? Well, if you haven’t heard we are in a little something the kids like to call a recession. As Reprise Media’s Managing Partner Peter Hershberg said in our press release today,  “The recession forces marketers to put much more scrutiny on every advertising dollar they spend…While some brands clearly got this message, we still see far too many throwing away millions of dollars by failing to connect their TV campaign with an integrated search and social media presence.”

With production costs for TV spots running as high as $6 – $10 million, plus the $3 million cost for Super Bowl airtime, why not wring every single dollar out of those ads?

Want to keep up with the Scorecard? Check out our Scorecard feed on Twitter at @scorecard .

Gone is the Ask 3D results panel which brought up relevant audio, video and image files in a sidebar next to classic link-and-description search results. 3D drew a lot of critical praise after its launch last year but unfortunately, the short term traffic boost didn’t ultimately convince

In its place, Ask has integrated a new Q&A tab that aggregates subjective Q&A discussions from sites such as Yahoo! Answers, eHow and Answers.com. For an example, see this list of responses to “What is the best HDTV?”

They also added a new “Answer” icon that pops up when the engine knows a definitive answer to a question, like “How Many Ounces in a Liter?” or “Who is the President of the United States“.

The redesign was accompanied by a series of bizarre new TV ads which are debuting to a limited audience this week. Here’s an example, featuring an eigth grader with an extremely obese woman grafted onto his back.

Um. Right. So what exactly were they thinking when they decided to give me that particular nightmare? Let’s hear from the ad agency that birthed it (via AdWeek):

“We wanted to get back to the brand’s heritage which was questions and answers and give the brand some emotion,” said Doug Raboy, managing partner of Hanft Raboy, who had worked with [Ask.com CEO James] Safka in his past roles at Match.com and AT&T Wireless. “We wanted to give the brand more of a pulse and make it feel a little more human.”

Not exactly sure the ads accomplish that last goal – with their weird monotone delivery these ads feel about as human as a David Lynch movie. But whether or not you like the creative, the company’s focus is clearly back on differentiation through natural language searches – answering the world’s questions instead of organizing the world’s information.

Full disclosure: I spent more than three years with Ask.com during the “Jeeves” era. I witnessed first hand what the Q&A positioning did to the way people looked at the site, and saw how hard the company tried to shake the perception that it was better suited for settling bar bets than serving as a day to day search engine.  And that was in ’02. At this point, searchers are more sophisticated – they have a lot less of a need to go to a site that “speaks their language”.

In the end, all the change feels like a step backwards for Ask. The results don’t seem much faster or more relevant than they have been in the past. They’re certainly less interesting. And perhaps most disappointing, almost every results page I’ve seen feels overloaded with ads.

Take the example below, which was pulled from another one of Ask’s new TV spots, this one dealing with a cop on the prowl for some cougars. The spot ends with a screenshot of the reply page, showing the results for the query “Is COPS on TV tonight?” As you can see in the screencap from the commercial on the left, the first result is one of Ask’s new “Answer” results, immediately followed by a OneBox result describing COPS. On the right is the actual result set, which starts with three paid search ads, pushing the COPS info down almost below the fold:

While the result set is essentially the same, the added paid search links make the page feel much less relevant to the question.

The event (additional coverage here courtesy of Ad Age), which was part of last week’s Advertising Week festivities, focused on search marketing for large corporations, sort of a 200-level SEM course that assumed that the crowd of roughly 100 marketers were coming to the table with some level of beginner’s knowledge.

First up in the morning was a joint case study from Reprise Media and Microsoft on the challenges of managing search for an enterprise brand. Mark Grote, Senior Search Advertising Manager for Microsoft started off, by framing up the challenge of running the company’s search efforts in fairly colorful terms:

“Doing search for an enterprise brand is like being a mosquito at a nudist colony – I know what I need to do, I just have no idea where to start.”

To illustrate the challenge, Grote walked the crowd through the structure of Microsoft’s Windows division – 15 versions of Vista, promoted by 23 different stakeholders using a wide range competing business goals (downloads vs. sales vs. etc.) With all these different variables, it’s tough to know how exactly to most effectively manage a campaign.

Peter followed this up by highlighting the major elements of our relationship with Microsoft (and, for that matter, the essential parts of any enterprise campaign):

• Educating stakeholders, so that all of the thousands of Microsoft marketers have the same resources and the same set of best practices in search
• Recalibrating Goals: Because the marketing organization in an enterprise-level client is often quite decentralized, you often deal with departments who track and measure success very differently. Getting everyone speaking the same language helps to make campaign management scalable – if we all agreed on what we’re trying to accomplish we can go about it much more quickly.
• Repurposing search learnings: Enterprise search campaigns produce a lot of data. When taken in aggregate, this data can help you learn things about how your audience views your products and the market in general. We developed processes to help Microsoft feed this information back into their decision making.
• Sharing assets between agencies: By speaking regularly with Microsoft’s network of agencies and marketing partners and getting early visibility into Microsoft’s marketing efforts (such as the recent Jerry Seinfeld/Bill Gates ads) we can predict where demand is likely to come from and match it with relevant search ads. (For example, not just buying Microsoft’s brand terms, but memorable terms from the commercial, like “warm churro.”)
• Managing Search Overlap: Finally, with any enteprise level campaign, you run into overlap issues, where multiple business units need to run on the same keywords at the same time. We helped

(If you’re interested in seeing more, a full copy of our joint presentation can be viewed here via SlideShare.)

Afterwards we were treated to a great panel discussion on recent trends in search. Ad Age assembled a very interesting cast of characters, including Curt Hecht from Vivaki/Starcom, Ron Belanger from Yahoo, Jeff Glueck CMO from Travelocity (and self-proclaimed Chief Gnome Guy) and moderator James Lamberti from ComScore. Among the major topics discussed:

• Branding Value of Search: The panelists were in agreement that the nature of the conversation has changed. As Ron from Yahoo pointed out, ten years ago we were arguing that search deserved consideration as a replacement for TV & Radio. Now the industry realizes that they each play their own role. Demand is created in other media, and fulfilled in search.”Expanding on the point, Glueck reminded the audience that “Google & Yahoo can’t force someone to type your brand into their blank box.” The implication was clear. Search not only won’t replace these other forms of media, it’s reliant on them to create the demand that causes someone to initiate their search in the first place.Hecht agreed, and expanded on ways in which marketers should be considering this interplay between search and other forms of media. As an example, he referred back to the Google/Pontiac campaign which launched a few years ago. At the time, he was at GM, and said that the Pontiac team “were thinking about ‘what’s really going to happen if someone types in our brand on Google?’ We tried to control as much as possible of what’s going on that page. That’s when it was all text. Now with universal search, there’s so much more that could show up there – images, video, social media. You need to consider it all.”
• Buying Branded Terms: Jeff Glueck from Travelocity mentioned that they run more than two million keywords, but a huge portion of their profit comes from people searching on their brand terms, such as Travelocity & Travelocity.com. He attributed this inequity to their efforts to create brand equity in the marketplace.He likened buying branded terms to being a professional gambler: “If you’re really good at blackjack & you know you can win – why would you want to put that money back into a slot machine before you leave the casino? That’s what happens when you buy a generic term that might not convert. You shouldn’t be willing to subsidize or lose money on another term when you can get so much cash.”
• Yahoogle: The subject of the Yahoo/Google partnership also came up, as it will any time search is discussed anywhere these days. We got both sides of the debate – Ron from Yahoo shared the positives of a potential tie-up between the companies: more inventory for advertisers, an ability for Yahoo to select best of breed content and ads for its users regardless of where it comes from.Then Jeff from Travelocity threw a bit of water on all that kumbaya-ing: “I’m not concerned about exposing our brand to more consumers. The Travelocity gnome has 30,000 friends on Facebook. That said, I AM concerned about exposing such a large percentage of my livelihood to a Google/Yahoo partnership.” He went on to point out that many companies have come to rely on the revenue they get from AdWords. Google recently revised the rev share split from 70% to 60%. Once they stop competing with Yahoo, will it drop even farther?

The signs are starting to crop up in the advertising world: Companies are starting to make hard decisions, like Gawker which announced yesterday that it was dumping three blogs, including Wonkette, in a cost-cutting effort. Cautionary commentaries are beginning to crop up in most advertising publications, like this one, advising media buyers how best to weather the storm.

So how about search marketing? Has the panic of a down market set in yet? Not exactly. In fact, as we continue to inch towards the abyss, SEM may prove to be the most recession-proof of all ad formats.

In an article he penned for Search Engine Watch, Reprise Media’s Managing Partner Joshua Stylman shares his viewpoint on search marketing’s unique resistance to a recession:

John Wanamaker famously said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” He would have loved search marketing, because it is one of very few kinds of media that provides visibility into the wasted half. Furthermore, it is arguably the most accountable of all advertising media. By virtue of robust reporting from search engines, sophisticated web analytics, and back-end tracking systems, advertisers can see exactly where their money is going in a paid search campaign: what keywords are converting into sales or page views, and what’s not working.

Get the rest of the article

In fact, the site is entirely nondescript other than the counter clock, a familiar favicon and a title tag that reads, simply, ““Google Blackout”:

Curious.

Somewhat intrigued (OK, more bored than anything as long as we’re being honest here), I poked around a little. A quick view of the source code didn’t provide much info.

Ditto the WHOIS data, where I hit the “Private Registrant” wall thanks to Dreamhost:

Domain Name: googleblackout.com
Registrant Contact:
googleblackout.com Private Registrant
googleblackout.com@proxy.dreamhost.com
DreamHost Web Hosting
417 Associated Rd #324
Brea, CA 92821
US
+1.2139471032

Based on the number of seconds left (roughly 7,640,000 at the time of this writing) the countdown should end right at 1/1/08.

I poked around the search blogosphere, and didn’t find any other mention of the Google Blackout site, which led me to start speculating.

There are any number of things it could be:

•
• Some sort of unannounced Google PR stunt (perhaps leading up to the launch of the Google Phone, which is expected by some to be released in Q1 08?)
• The workings of an overzealous energy zealot?
• An utterly geeky new A.R.G.? Google has been known to dabble in the gaming stuff before, with the Davinci Code & Bourne Ultimatum.
• A new search competitor that’s looking to generate some Google-killer buzz for itself while in stealth mode?

Or how about:

• A really big waste of time for a search geek with a computer?

Just for kicks, I turned off Javascript to see what that would do to the countdown clock. After a refresh, I was surprised to see a new series of numbers and symbols… like GPS coordinates.

37* 25′ 38″, -122* 5′ 57″

A quick search at http://boulter.com/gps/ turned up the answer – these are the GPS coordinates for Google’s Mountain View office.

What’s more, the source code now includes a link in the header to a Technorati search for “Google Monopoly”

Doesn’’t sound like the kind of thing the folks at Google would plant in a promo page.

So what do you all think it is? Anyone have any idea what those non-Java characters could mean?