Bowl Ads Still Neglect Basic SEM Blocking and Tackling

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 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 SEM practice 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 2006 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 Web URL but failed to give viewers a strong reason to go there, Stylman says. Doritos, Chevrolet and the NFL garnered a lot of pre-game buzz for their commercials using consumer-generated media. But all three failed to capitalize on that attention with a clear call to the Web site, either in their TV spots or in paid search.

“They all did a really good job leading up to the game, but didn’t re-engage the community the night of the game via the search channel,” he 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 Web site. 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.

Advertisers have to put themselves in the minds of the consumers,” Stylman said. “Those viewers are going to take something away from the commercial—whether the brand, or a creative appeal, or in this case, ‘Snack Strong’,” Stylman says. “It’s incumbent on the marketer to make sure they’re present wherever a consumer might think about looking for them.”

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

Frisbie points out that most of the Super Bowl marketers also dropped the ball on optimizing for natural search. Advertisers could take advantage of tools like 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. No one did that this year.

“We didn’t see anyone taking advantage of optimization to ensure consistent messaging within the natural algorithmic results,” she 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 standout MVPs among this year’s roster. Stylman pointed 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 Web site.

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 Web site 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 pre-digital 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 ad 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 Web site, 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 from the Human Rights Campaign and the Gay and Lesbian Alliance against Defamation complained to the company almost immediately, pointing out that jeering reactions from athletes to the sight of two men kissing amounted to “anti-gay 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.