-- Media & Marketing: Marketers Take Search Ads Beyond Search Engines --- Facebook, MySpace, iPhone Figure in Efforts by Pizza Hut, Others to Boost Online Exposure While Controlling Costs
By Emily Steel
694 words
20 January 2009
The Wall Street Journal
B4
English
(Copyright (c) 2009, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)
Marketers, seeking to boost their online exposure while keeping a lid on costs, are looking beyond Internet search engines such as Google and Yahoo to find new places for their search ads.
The trend reflects a change in the way consumers are navigating the Web. More online searches now take place on YouTube, the popular video site owned by Google, than on Yahoo, the No. 2 Web-search property. The change has companies including Pizza Hut, Universal Pictures and Monster.com rethinking their search marketing strategies.
Even as No. 1 search engine Google's share of the online ad market -- including search ads -- continues to grow, marketers have started shifting ad purchases to other digital media, from social-networking sites to mobile phones. "Search is being redefined in a lot of different ways," says Peter Hershberg, managing partner at Reprise Media, a search marketing agency owned by Interpublic Group.
In search-engine advertising, marketers bid on key words in a continuous auction. When a consumer searches for any of the words, the marketer's ad appears above or next to the results, depending on the amount the company bids and an algorithm the search engines use to determine an ad's relevance to a particular search.
For the past few years Pizza Hut has bought ads on the major search engines tied to pizza-related searches, such as "cheese pizza" and "pizza delivery." Placing bids on those terms pits the Yum Brands restaurant chain against many competitors, including Domino's Pizza, Papa John's International and even local pizzerias, which have made search advertising an important piece of their own marketing. The auction system for the ads ultimately increases the price each pizza marketer pays when a consumer clicks on an ad.
Lately, Pizza Hut has started working with its agency, WPP's Group M Search, to expand its search-ad buys to new areas. The chain started buying mobile search ads to pitch its products. And to publicize the launch of a new whole-grain pizza, Pizza Hut is creating a promotion and buying ads through Facebook. While the Facebook ads aren't technically search ads, they are part of a broader effort to boost the company's profile in the nonpaid search results consumers get when seeking online information.
Over the past decade, search has evolved into the biggest category of online ad spending in the
On Facebook and MySpace, marketers don't buy ads tied to search terms. Instead, the ads are linked to information that users reveal about themselves on the sites, such as their age, hobbies or other personal interests.
Universal Pictures, a unit of General Electric, has started working with its digital agency 360i to buy sponsored video ads on YouTube to promote its recent film releases. Recent YouTube searches for "horror film" or "scary movie," for instance, display a link to a sponsored video for the supernatural thriller "The Unborn." Clicking on the ad takes visitors to a spot on YouTube where they can watch a movie trailer or other promotions for the film.
Job-listing site Monster.com, meanwhile, is testing a search-ad program for mobile searches done on the iPhone. "It just seemed like a no-brainer, that we would want to be able to access users on their smartphones and do that through a proven environment," says John Federico, vice president of global media at Monster.com.
1 comment:
This is an article that attacks something that advertisers are constantly trying to control: where the audience is. Advertisers are forced, in order to maintains success, to look to various outlets in order to promote their brand or product. As the article says, Google is still growing and is a great place to advertise. But in order to fully grasp the market in every regard, they have to look elsewhere. Mobile marketing is something that I think is going to be huge in the next decade. We have only seen the beginning, but with cell phones oftentimes being the best way to reach someone, advertisers will certainly target that medium.
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