Bowl Ads Neglect Basic SEM Blocking and Tackling

(Searchline) Ninety million people sat down to watch a lot of commercials last Sunday night, and a football game broke out.

That small distraction didn’t stop advertisers from doing more search marketing than ever against their Bowl TV spots, in the expectation that viewers would jump from the flat-screen to the desktop to find more information about products and the commercials that flacked them.

Search marketing firm Reprise Media has been rating advertisers’ Super search performance since Game XXIX back in MMV (2005) and found some improvement in the basic search metrics this year. For example, 58% of in-game advertisers ran pay-per-click (PPC) ads against their brand names, a 16% increase over last year. And a quarter of them also bid on game-related keywords such as “Super Bowl ads.”

Otherwise, however, best search engine marketing practices took a brutal pounding at this year’s game. Reprise determined that 70% of the landing pages for those PPC Bowl ads didn’t have any detectable association with the game or the advertiser’s TV spot. Overall, three-quarters of game advertisers didn’t carry their TV message through their search marketing in any way visitors could recognize. In fact, 53% of the pages didn’t include an online version of the commercial that drove people to the sight–a rookie mistake that plenty of ad veterans fell prey to.

“There’s obviously a lot of complexity associated with search marketing, but some of the concepts are so commonsensical that it’s remarkable that in [2007] some advertisers are still failing to do them,” says Josh Stylman, managing partner with New York-based Reprise. “Last year we noticed that even the advertisers who focused on having a search campaign really fell short when it came to finishing the conversation with the customer by sending them to a Web page that fulfills the promise their ad made.”

For this year’s scorecard, Reprise partnered with Optimost, a Web testing and optimization platform. Optimost’s color commentary on the landing-page performance included some interesting stats. For example, while more than half of game marketers didn’t post their commercial on their page, 55% did offer value-adds such as podcasts, deleted scenes, or wallpaper. Great–except that 55% also failed to include what Optimost and Reprise felt was a clear call to action on the Web page.

That tracks with the 90% of advertisers whose commercials posted a URL but failed to give viewers a strong reason to go there, Stylman says. Doritos, Chevrolet, and the NFL garnered a lot of pregame buzz for their commercials using consumer-generated media. But all three failed to capitalize on that attention with a clear call to the Website, either in their TV spots or in paid search.

“They all did a really good job leading up to the game but didn’t reengage the community the night of the game via the search channel,” Stylman says. “It was like running the first 25 miles of a marathon and then stopping.”

Viewers with good-enough eyesight to catch a quick glimpse of the Doritos URL were sent to a general product Website. True, tucked away in that site were all five consumer-generated finalists in its “Crash the Super Bowl” ad contest. But the URL referred to a broad Doritos tagline, not the Bowl ads, and searching on it on Yahoo! or Google didn’t bring up any Doritos PPC ads.

Other marketers that came up short included all the automakers. Although General Motors had a search campaign tied to its “unemployed robot” spot including bids on “robot,” Anne Frisbie, vice president of category at Yahoo! Search Marketing, points out that it could have done more by bidding on some of the prominent tags and features in its ads such as “American Revolution” or “extended warranty.”

Frisbie also notes that most of the Super Bowl marketers dropped the ball on optimizing for natural search. Advertisers could take advantage of tools such as Yahoo! Quick Links to run time-limited hyperlinks under their organic listings that led directly to an online commercial or a Super Bowl-specific landing page–but no one did.

“We didn’t see anyone taking advantage of optimization to ensure consistent messaging within the natural algorithmic results,” Frisbie says. “I’ll be interested to see if we get any further with that next year, enabling marketers to have even more control of the [search results] page.”

There were some MVPs among this year’s roster. Stylman points to the ad for SalesGenie.com as one that offered a compelling call to action with its offer of 100 free sales leads for registering on the company’s Website.

Both Frisbie and Stylman single out Pizza Hut’s spots as a good example of offline/online integration. The commercials pointed not to a standard Website but to a Pizza Hut channel on YouTube where visitors could add their own comments. “We thought that showed incredible Web savvy,” Stylman says. “Unlike the predigital era, when there was no shelf life for these ads once they aired, this campaign has real life beyond the event so that Pizza Hut can get more mileage out of it. It’s a way of continuing the conversation with the consumer.”

Storing the ad for future viewing also makes sense because the Pizza Hut ad with Jessica Simpson is apparently the start of an ongoing mobile campaign, in which viewers will decode clues in the spots and text them to THEHUT to win prices.

One Super Bowl spot did a good job of continuing the conversation, only to have that chat cut short by public outcry. A Snickers takeoff on the movie “Brokeback Mountain” showed two burly mechanics accidentally kissing while eating a candy bar. Snickers bid on keywords surrounding the ad and set up a Website, AftertheKiss.com, where viewers could go and vote on what happened after that awkward cliffhanger ending, including footage of Super Bowl players supposedly jeering at the kiss.

But advocacy groups ranging including the Human Rights Campaign and the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) complained to the company almost immediately, pointing out that jeering reactions from athletes to the sight of two men kissing amounted to “antigay bullying.” Snickers quickly promised not to show the commercial again and to pull it from the Web. The AftertheKiss.com URL now points to a general Snickers site.

Interactive marketing firm SendTec points out that Snickers failed to bid on the term “after the kiss” for search ads. That omission may turn out to have been the only bright spot to Snickers’ Super Bowl foray.