Tom Brew

Recently, I’ve noticed a lot of TV adverts for big brands’ products or services really make a point of directing those watching to search online for a brand name, event or even just keywords. Often, this is in place of their own web address. For example, the other day I caught a TV ad for Sony Ericsson’s new mobile phone, the Vivaz. Just as the ad was finishing, the nice voiceover lady said something along the lines of “...search one for Sony Ericsson Vivaz.” Which led me to think, “hmm?”

Everyone knows that TV ads (well, the good ones anyway and not ones involving particular comparison websites and annoying singing waiters) are meticulously thought out. Shedloads of effort is obviously put into their visual style and what message they’re trying to convey and to whom, but what isn’t so clear is so why many are starting to do undertake this practice of directing viewers to search online instead of blurting out their web address.

Well, in true rhetorical blogging style, I’ve got a couple of ideas:

This one’s probably a bit unlikely. Advertisers could have deals in place with certain search engines so that some kind of mutual benefit is gained depending on the level of traffic or number of search queries their TV ads generate. Or, and perhaps more realistically, is that advertisers have some kind of partnership going one with a search engine to direct consumers to their particular search engine. If so, we might start hearing more nice voiceover ladies instructing us to, just “Google this”? or “Bing that” or “Yah...” ...maybe not the last one.

The other reason, and the one that’s most likely in my opinion, is that advertisers are really, really putting faith in social media to promote their products or services. Say for example a TV ad tells me to search online for Dave’s Parrot Hire, and I do (who wouldn’t?) my search results would probably contain a link to Dave’s Parrot Hire’s corporate pages, but there would also be a myriad of links to blogs, twitter/facebook updates, forums, review sites all talking about Dave’s Parrot Hire. Potentially pretty powerful stuff when you think about it, as Dave could really leverage the positive things people are saying about his parrot hire service on the net and let his consumers do the promoting for him using super viral social media. However, you’d have to be quite prepared to take the risk of directing your would-be consumers to possible negative opinions about your product, but this is all part of the social media marketing game.

If you haven’t noticed this “search online for...” stuff getting mentioned at the end of TV ads then congrats for being immune to the advertiser’s propaganda, but I’d try and look out for it and see what you think.

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