If you haven’t seen the TV ads for Ebay’s new “it” campaign, they’re worth a look. Ebay’s playing with a new market here and their attempt to juxtapose post-modern (or post-post-modern) styling and panache with a humorous twist on all things Steve Jobs is fairly remarkable.
They’ve also got a web campaign running for the product that’s attracted some nice attention. The website is 100% flash and has 3 components – a set of videos that parody/promote “it”, a morphable “it” in glass, steel, pink, etc. that can be made into a poster PDF and a search function that maps to Ebay. Is it a legitimate use for Flash? Are they bringing in the traffic? Did the new site get sandboxed?
Here’s some answers:
- Well, the site has the meta keywords and descrip tags “what is it” and the same for the title tag. The indexable content is pretty much zilch. But… It’s easy to use, fun to watch, and I’d say, it gets the job done.
- 1,200 (according to the latest Yahoo! numbers) links to the domain – I’d call that pretty successful since we’re talking about a single page site. According to Alexa, traffic looks pretty nice, too.
- 100% Sandboxed – I see about 10 pages of SERPs (for “what is it” ebay, almost all of which are actually pointing to the site itself, yet I couldn’t find whatis-it.com. I was able to get it when I added the common anchor text phrase campaign, but as we well know, if you throw enough query terms Google’s way, they’ll eventually figure it out…
I like content like this, but if I were to make one change, I’d 301 and host it at whatis-it.ebay.com.
