• by Tameka Kee , January 29, 2008

Super Bowl Ads Call the Flea Flicker with Search

About 20 advertisers paid CBS as much as $2.6 million for a 30-second spot during Super Bowl XLI — and last year, one search agency in particular was able to capture, track and analyze the fulfillment of their clients’ TV spend for less than 1 percent of the cost. Outrider, the St. Louis-based search division of WPP’s GroupM, did it for Pizza Hut.

Pop tart Jessica Simpson (pre-Tony Romo jinx) may have been the celebrity star shilling “Cheesy Bites” in the spot, but it was the ensuing spike in traffic to the MorePizzaHut YouTube channel, robust PPC ad click-thru rates (CTRs) and increased online orders at pizzahut.com on the day of the game that garnered the campaign accolades.

For Super Bowl XLII Outrider is at it again, helming a campaign for Campbell’s Pace salsa brand, among others. Chris Copeland, Outrider’s senior partner and managing director, and Kristine Segrist and Kaylyn Slaughter, client service leads for the Pizza Hut and Campbell’s brands, respectively, had much to say about the agency’s strategy for leveraging social media, TV and search for Super Bowl success. 

It starts with a thorough integration of search from the onset. Outrider’s team worked with Pizza Hut’s in-house brand managers, planners and buyers at sister company Mediaedge:cia (MEC) and interactive shop imc2 during the strategic planning process — collaborating on everything from keyword and ad copy research, to landing page design, flight planning and the overall look and feel of the YouTube channel.

“That was absolutely critical to the success,” Segrist says. “Search can’t exist in a vacuum. It’s a powerful, viable media channel, but the execution is much weaker overall if it’s thrown in as an afterthought.”

Craft a Cunning Keyword Strategy 

When it came to keywords, Outrider chose branded phrases like “Jessica Simpson Super Bowl commercial” and “Pizza Hut Super Bowl ad,” as well as generic terms like “Super Bowl commercial” — but applied spend limitations to the broader terms to avoid cannibalization of the budget.

The agency also drafted an extensive list of negative keywords — or search terms that they wanted to prevent the ads from showing up for. “Jessica Simpson is an attractive young woman, so frankly there are people who will do queries wondering if she’s naked,” Copeland said. “You don’t want to have the brand associated with that kind of search, and you want to make the budget go farther by not spending the money for those kinds of clicks.”  

Google, Yahoo and msn all allow advertisers to exclude specific keywords during the campaign-creation process, so Outrider chose vanilla terms like “daisy dukes,” “bikini” and some other, more provocative words to ensure that the ads didn’t show up for any less-than-savory search queries.

The Best Defense

Real-time, aggressive campaign management was a must for maintaining prime SERP positioning on the day of the Big Game, so Outrider assigned what they called a “Super Bowl SWAT team” to the task of adjusting keywords and budget as needed.

“You have to monitor your campaign from kick-off to the moment your ad airs, to post-game traffic,” Copeland says. “You need to see which ads are drawing the clicks, where the consumers are going and make changes over the 24- to 72-hour life of the campaign.”

Devote extra manpower to this defensive, if necessary, because if your ad moves out of prime position on any of the engines, you want someone there to get it right back. Every minute counts — so literally having a bid manager on hand to scan the results, refresh the page and then scan again is the way to truly maximize the Super Bowl hype. 

Plan for Next Season

Post-campaign analysis showed that Outrider’s ads had an average CTR of 3 percent, and had helped drive a tremendous amount of traffic to Pizza Hut’s YouTube channel. Meanwhile, consumers placed hundreds of online orders at pizzahut.com on the day of the game, and search interest around the brand had spiked by more than 95 percent during the campaign (compared to the daily average).

The team then used those analytics and client feedback from Pizza Hut to improve their events-based search strategy for the next challenge. 

“One thing we learned was that we’d underestimated how much volume and demand this kind of media event could generate,” Segrist says. “We could have increased the budget and made the flight time a little longer to really capitalize on the game day fever and water cooler buzz.” Segrist adds that some tweaks to the YouTube landing page could have increased the engagement factor.

And now they’re set to drive down the field during the Super Bowl XLII campaign for Campbell’s Pace salsa brand — an effort tied to pre-game preparations with the goal of driving in-store purchases. According to Slaughter, the pre-Super Bowl push is just one element of a search strategy that’s integrated into Campbell’s new multi-platform campaign for Pace, one that’s aimed at positioning the salsa as the “appetizer of choice” for all kinds of celebrations. 

“While the overall search program is integrated with Campbell’s cross-channel media planning, it is important for us as their search strategists to identify key opportunities like the Super Bowl throughout the year, to engage consumers in a timely, relevant way,” Slaughter says. With the right preseason training, this year’s game could be a rout.