I wonder if Senator Obama knows that a vendor is using his name in their advertising?
This is a brief article on a few things:
• Defending your brand name.
• 1960’s Burger King marketing technique.
• Celebrity advertising in PPC.
• Landing pages that don’t match PPC ads.
Defending your Brand Name - In Google, I did a search for Aweber, the well known email opt-in service. Every company needs to search their brand name on the major search engines to see what’s happening. I call this “defending the brand”.
1960’s Burger King marketing technique - Off to the right of the screen, you can see a PPC ad by iContact. They’re not Aweber, they’re a competitor. But Google allows this type of advertising. There must be a fancy marketing term for it like “shadowing” or something like that. As a kid growing up I heard that Burger King’s marketing strategy was to find a McDonald’s and build a Burger King next to it. If McDonald’s liked the area, so did Burger King. Well, iContact used that technique to benefit from Aweber’s well marketed brand name. Google allows that all the time in their PPC.
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Celebrity Advertising in PPC - Again, in the same PPC ad, you can see the use of Barack Obama’s name to attract attention. Let’s call that celebrity advertising. Perhaps he allowed this use of his name, I rather doubt it myself.
Landing Pages that Don’t Match PPC Ads – When you click on the iContact ad you won’t find anything regarding Barack Obama. Strange. I thought Senator Obama “chose” their service.
So, I’ve often wondered about Google allowing such ads. They do. I have one client that I know will absolutely not use the shadow marketing or 1960’s Burger King technique in PPC marketing. But Google allows it, and many use it.
But does the owner of iContact know his PPC guy or gal is playing off Senator Obama’s name? Probably not. I wonder how much the celebrity advertising technique improved iContact’s CTR (Click Through Rate)?
For me, I suppose I would use the industry practice of shadow marketing in PPC ads. As for the celebrity status technique, I doubt I would use it unless I had the permission of the celebrity.
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