Oh my gosh. I can’t believe I haven’t posted in so long. The hangnail situation from last time? Well, it got even more out of hand and it’s really been taking all my time. The good news is I have some new people in place and things are looking really squared away now– nice trim cuticles, shiny nails, smooth skin. I’m kind of starting to get veiny old lady hands like Madonna, but that just comes with the territory of impending middle age. My overall plan for all things related to aging has been to try to redefine beauty standards so that age spots are desirable. We’ll see how that goes.
So! Some men in tiny pants played a game on Sunday to great acclaim and huge audience (I say that all casually as if I wasn’t down on my knees the entire 3 hours praying to the gods of jambalaya, voodoo, and whoever else would listen for a Saints win). In fact, preliminary results say that the broadcast became the most-watched program in US history, with 106 million viewers. And, being the marketing geek that I am, I of course looked up from my prayers at each break to check out the ads. This won’t be a “Best and Word Ads” post, although suffice it to say that I’m certainly never purchasing a Dodge Charger nor doing any business with GoDaddy any time soon. But my heart did an embarrassing pitter-patter when I saw the Google logo and realized they had done a Superbowl ad buy.
Because Google, of course, does not do ad buys. Seeing a Google ad is like seeing J.D. Salinger out at the grocery store (and I’m keeping that in the present tense on purpose, because Salinger lives 4eva). I was also intrigued to see that it was an ad for what most would assume they do not need to advertise at all, their core search product. I’ve seen their billboards for other products, which make sense as they try to extend their tentacles across your entire online experience. But core search product is what they pushed, which tickled my special geek place even more. I yelled out to my husband to draw his attention to the ad, which was completely unnecessary as he was sitting right beside me. The excitement could not be held back.
It also helped that the ad itself was excellent, telling the story of a Parisian romance in about one minute, all through search terms from “impress a french girl” to “how to assemble a crib”. It stayed true to Google’s clean and simple aesthetic while quickly showcasing a variety of capabilities from translation to mapping to flight tracking. It also packed real emotional impact into a tiny space, reminding me of what I always love about doing keyword research, which is thinking about the real people and real stories behind the queries. I’m a romantic, dammit, and the ad made my eye glisten a little.
So today when I hopped onto eHow to do a little research, the top tip of the day really stood out to me:
Look! There it is! How to assemble a crib! Aww.
Now, there’s nothing that indicates why this is a “top tip”– it is very likely that the clever editors of eHow just took advantage of the Google ad buy to boost traffic. But they wouldn’t be doing that if they weren’t getting some good traffic on the article, I would think, and the eHow listing does come up tops when you put that phrase into Google. This is another listing on the home page:
Which is also a top Google search result if you enter “impress a French Girl” into Google.
Are there millions of new hits coming to eHow because of Google’s ad buy? Doubtful. But increased traffic is increased traffic, and it’s even better when someone else paid for it.
Man, I gotta figure out how to get on that plan.