Many of you, no doubt, are familiar with the Whopper Virgins work by CP+B for Burger King. Even I openly admit to liking the concept, the ads, and the site. The campaign relies on TV awareness to drive people to a web site. Simple enough. But, there are two giant flaws in the campaign and AdAge covers it really well here.
Flaw #1: The didn’t invest in any paid search engine marketing.
Flaw #2: They didn’t optimize the site to index against Whopper Virgins AND Whopper Virgin (sans S)
So why are these flaws?
Answer
Because nearly 50% of the searches are for Whopper Virigin (no S). And when you type that into Google (because no one really types in the URL) you don’t see any paid search ads driving you to the right site nor do you see Whoppervirgins.com appear on the first page.
Paid search should be part of EVERY TV driven campaign. It has to be. People may not remember the URL, the brand, or the product, but they generally remember the story. My favorite example of this was how GM outsmarted Ford during the 2006 Super Bowl. You can read the full story here. The short version is the following:
- Ford paid a boat load of money to run a Super Bowl spot touting their Ford Escape hybrid
- In the spot they had Kermit The Frog sing, “It’s Not Easy Being Green”
- GM didn’t run an ad, but they did buy a lot of paid search around the concept of the Ford ads; keep in mind they can’t legally buy “Ford” or any other branded/trademarked name
- Ford didn’t buy any paid search
- So when people were looking for that ad that featured Kermit, guess who came up in the results? GM, not Ford.
Again, purchasing is such a basic and simple part of a campaign. Next time we think about vanity URLs, like WhopperVirgins.com we should always try to get the misspelled versions, invest in some paid search, and optimize the site to cover a wide range of terms.
Head of Social Media at Walgreens. Interactive marketer, innovator, boat rocker, continuous learner, movie lover, risk taker, dad and all around good guy. I'm always up for a spirited conversation. These are my thoughts and ramblings, not those of my employer.
