Yahoo Rewards Brands that Search
In an effort to encourage big branding advertisers to integrate search marketing into their campaigns, Yahoo handed out its first Search Light award yesterday to RPA Interactive, the agency that designed an online campaign for the Honda Element.
RPA’s “Honda Element: A Different Animal” campaign uses an interactive online game in which visitors drive a Honda around an island and have conversations with some odd animals, including a crab, a possum, and a platypus. To help drive traffic to the site, RPA broadened its keyword list to include not only the Honda brand name and categories but words like “funny’, “freaky”, and “hairy”.
And by bidding on low-cost search terms such as “possum” and “platypus”, the agency was able to keep costs down on a search campaign that wound up driving 40% of all the referrals generated by the project. Other research showed that the Honda Element search ads helped lift awareness, brand favorability and purchase intent among the carmaker’s target audience.
The Honda campaign was one of about 25 submissions for the award, according to Yahoo Search Marketing senior director Ron Belanger. He and his team winnowed the candidates down to four finalists, who presented their campaigns and tracking metrics at a Yahoo sponsored gathering of 100 ad specialists in New York Wednesday. The audience heard the presentations, and then voted for the campaign they thought most innovative and successful.
Beside RPA and the Honda Element, the other Search Light finalists were Avenue A/Razorfish for Chase’s “Love the Double” credit card spots; Miller Brewing and Agency.com for “Beer Run”; and General Motors.
Among search engines, Yahoo has been particularly active in going after a portion of the ad budgets of the big branding marketers. Largely because of its pay-per-click business model, search marketing has traditionally been a direct-response ad vehicle with special appeal for businesses without big mass-media budgets.
But as entertaining and interactive Web sites become more important to all types and sizes of merchants, search engines see an opportunity for ad revenue in paid-search ads that send visitors to those sites.
“We’ve really started to see some of our agency partners think strategically and creatively about search outside the direct-response funnel,” Belanger said. “Marketers are looking at their Web sites from a consumer-engagement standpoint, not just shipping widgets. We thought it would be neat to get all the best minds together into a room and share the more forward-thinking search campaigns.”
Belanger said Yahoo intends to make the Search Light award an annual presentation, and that he expects to see “50 to 100” submissions next year, as more advertisers integrate search marketing into their broader ad campaigns.
