7 Comments

Competitive Brand Bidding Going Mainstream

Jan 30, 2006
by

Pontiac recently ran a TV ad in which they said at the end “Google Pontiac for more information”. It didn’t take long for competitors to start bidding on the term Pontiac. John Battelle shows a copy of the ad on his Searchblog.

Andrew Goodman has a good article on the issue on Webpronews.com where he spells out the following:

As long as certain conditions are satisfied, this is perfectly legal in the U.S., as many of us have long argued. It’s “in line with forms of comparative advertising” that have been legal all along.

This stellar move by Mazda leverages three powerful principles of keyword advertising. First, it targets a highly salient keyword that is theoretically available at decent cost. Second, it leverages someone else’s media spend. If Pontiac is devoting some of its ad budget to telling people to “Google Pontiac,” then the number of searches on “Pontiac,” by people actively seeking to learn about car features, goes up. Other advertisers can piggyback on that awareness (without spending the same TV and print ad dollars) by bidding on the same keywords, and measuring the results. All perfectly legal. Not only legal, but savvy.

I expect this trend will continue. It’s another good example of situations where companies might want to consider utlizing their trusted affiliate partners to help protect the ad spots on the search engine results page.

Also, saying “Google X” in your ad might not be a good idea, if you can’t guarantee the traffic.

Thoughts?

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About Adam Viener

Adam Viener is the Chairman & Founder of imwave, inc, a leading performance search engine marketing agency. Imwave focuses primarily on building and launching effective pay-per-click search engine keyword marketing campaigns for companies paying commissions on sales and leads generated. In both 2009, 2010 & 2011 Imwave was recognized as one of the fastest growing privately held companies by Inc. Magazine. Imwave recently announced they had served over 5 Billion ads for their clients!

Adam, a serial internet entrepreneur, founded one of the first commercial internet service providers (ISPs) in 1993. He has a deep understanding of internet technologies and profitable internet marketing tactics. Adam currently sits on the publisher advisory boards for Commission Junction and the Google Affiliate Network.

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Filed under: Search Engine Marketing
  • http://www.revenews.com Jim Kukral

    We've come a long way from "Aol Keyword: Pontiac" huh?

    Or what was the Compuserve phrase? "Go"? Something like that.

  • http://www.puritan.com Sal

    Interesting take. As simple as that sounds I just had not thought about it that way.

  • http://searchquant.blogspot.com Chris Zaharias

    I think that advertisers and agencies need to show their morals in situations like this, meaning – if the brand owner *asks* for the competitor to not buy ads on his/her brand, then we need to respect those wishes. If morals are thrown out the door, then it damages the credibility of the entire industry.

  • http://www.goyami.com Adam Viener

    Chris,

    That sounds nice, and if Coke asks Pepsi politely to stop running the Pepsi challenge and saying Pepsi tastes better than Coke, I am sure Pepsi will stop.

    Competitive marketing isn't going away, it's just starting to find its place in keyword advertising.

    I only see this increasing.

    Adam

  • http://www.ontarget-media.com Manoj Aravindakshan

    Soorry, but it kind of beats me who achieved what (and what the objective was) with a call to action like "Google Pontiac.."

    I tend to agree that "Google X… might not be a good idea", unless I've missed some vital aspect of this whole campaign.

    (a) The advertiser is literally contributing to building somebody else's brand (Google)– and helping it generate more revenues (Was this a joint ad or co-marketing excercise by any chance? Talking of which, would search engines want to consider co-marketing with the big advertisers– could be a decent revenue stream, perhaps).

    (b) Secondly, why is the advertiser increasing the number of steps required for its target customer to find out more about its products? Is the advertiser trying to indicate that there are "other places out there" where the target customers could find more detailed information about the advertiser's product?

    (c) The advertiser is also making a huge assumption that the search results that show up are indeed the most relevant and the sites that show up are the ones the advertiser will be comfortable with the target audience visiting…. now that is again placing too much faith on a search engine's algorithm…

    Manoj

  • http://www.revenews.com/davecole/2006/04/is_click_fraud_this_decades_vi.html ReveNews – Dave Cole

    Is Click Fraud this decade's 'victimless crime'?

    I can recall with vivid clarity the first time I saw Napster. It had a pretty simple interface, it worked pretty reliably, and it offerred an unbelievable catalog of *free* music. Hard drives were overflowing with tunes. Mp3 players were…

  • http://www.ymarketing.com/blog ymarketing

    Here is the 'behind the music' story on this:
    http://www.ymarketing.com/blog/2007/06/mazda-trum…