Like 150 million or so other folks, I spent today watching the Superbowl. As a marketer, it’s hard not to pay close attention to the advertisements, and this year featured a heavy focus on sending viewers to the web. However, I was a bit surprised that we didn’t see anything like 2007’s Pontiac advertisement:
At the end of the ad, Pontiac invites viewers to “Google” their brand to learn more. This seemed a bit odd in 2007, but today, it would have been a brilliant marketing move. Here’s why:
Personalized search is now on by default. This means that every click, branded search, and expression of a “brand preference” or “brand affinity” in Google’s results is likely to result in preferential biasing towards that domain in future searches. A “Google” Pontiac message during this Superbowl wouldn’t just send users to their site, it would also mean that tens of millions of searchers would now be “personalized” towards that domain.
I’m not sure when we’ll start to see this strategy employed, but it can’t be long. Personalization (and even social search, which Google pushed out of Labs two weeks ago) make leveraging your brand, in any channel, a powerful tool for SEO.
