Google Becomes a Medium for Sneaky Marketing Campaigns

Submitted by Tracy Steel on Mon, 02/20/2006 - 2:08pm.

The other day I saw a commercial for Pontiac. The commercial told customers to google “Pontiac” and to browse their site before heading to the dealership. It’s nice to see that companies are catching on to the generation that loves to do as much shopping online as possible (even if telling people to google “Pontiac” is the lazy man’s way of saying, go to www.pontiac.com). Telling customers in a television commercial to “google” their product name not only closes the gap between offline and online ads, but finds a way to engage those of us who use Google for just about everything (hey, I even used Google to find all the information I used in this entry).

But then Mazda, Pontiac’s competitor, did something rather sneaky. Mazda actually bought the search terms “Pontiac” and “Pontiac Solstice,” so that a sponsored link "Miata vs. Pontiac Solstice," comparing the cars, would show up if a customer entered either of those terms.

This is not exactly dishonest (and it is legal, actually), but it makes me wonder how much of what we search for on the internet is manipulated by marketing and advertisers. Tricks like these have always been around, but are now becoming more popular.

In another example, Google recently banned BMW’s German webpage from Google search results because the site purposely had the German word for “used cars” several times on the doorway page, in order to attract a higher search result rating.

It seems the internet marketing world is just following the model of the traditional market: only the big companies with money to burn on advertising get the most exposure, and thus, better sales. Buying ad space and search terms on Google is analogous to buying those huge billboards off of the freeway or full page ads in popular magazines. Unfortunately the internet is losing its raw, underground appeal--we have less and less control over what we see and what we're exposed to.

Ten years ago, it seemed big and small businesses had the same chance online, as resources on the internet were mostly unknown and untapped. I'm all for some good healthy competition between businesses, but now that big companies have discovered how to use the internet to their advantage, well, we’re even getting the commercialized version of a Google search.

Jacqueline Colozzi @ Mon, 02/20/2006 - 4:15pm

But then Mazda, Pontiac’s competitor, did something rather sneaky. Mazda actually bought the search terms “Pontiac” and “Pontiac Solstice,” so that a sponsored link "Miata vs. Pontiac Solstice," comparing the cars, would show up if a customer entered either of those terms.

So evil! Yet genius.

Tracy Wong @ Tue, 02/21/2006 - 1:32pm

I'm surprised that Mazda could do that. But as for sites purposely repeating words, I think that explains why porn sites keep popping up in Google searches on subjects vastly unrelated to their content. I think Pontiac asking us to Google their site (when their URL's pretty simple) implies how lazy today's people are - even if information is really just a click away.

Leslie @ Tue, 02/21/2006 - 7:18pm

I'm a little confused. I guess because I don't know how internet search engines work. So companies can pay to have their site "higher up" on the list, increasing the site's visibility - is that considered a "sponsored link" - the link in the bluish box that comes up first? Or are the links in the list also sponsored to come up early? And how does it normally work - the higher the number of hits a page gets determines how high it ranks on the results list?

Maybe if all links paid to come up at the top should be in a bluish box with the annotation, "sponsored link", so that consumers know it's advertising, similar to magazines where full-out spreads of products are labeled advertising (although it can be argued that everything included in a shopping magazine could be paid for - thus unlabelled advertising - I really don't know how it works).

Jacqueline Colozzi @ Tue, 02/21/2006 - 9:47pm

If you bombarded a website enough with hits, yes, it would move up the list.

Or you could just pay like everyone else.

It's called e-bombing, maybe?

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A group blog exploring our media world. Produced by the Digital Journalism: Blogging course at New York University, Spring 2007.

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