Hijackable Marketing

Back in the dark old days of the internet, Compuserve hoped to have everyone connect to the net via their service. Rather than all these horrible double-you double-yew double-ewe dot names you’d just have Compuserve keywords.

So you’d connect to the internet using the Compuserve software and then enter a keyword, say “finance”, to get to the relevant content.

I’m noticing more and more recently that advertisers seem to want us to go back to using keywords instead of website addresses.

Nintendo tell us in their recent advert “Search for DSI”. An advert for the new Monsters Vs Aliens film says to “go online and search for MVA”. Even the government are getting in on the act and telling us to search for “act on CO2″

What was wrong with just giving out a web address? Surely with this “search on…” approach you’re risking losing your traffic to a affiliate marketers or a competitor who is going to hijack your traffic with some good SEO?

Have I missed something or are advertisers just being very silly at the moment?

I’m attempting to hijack their marketing, but in a different way. Whenever you see an advert that uses this silly tactic, you’ll remember this blog post and think about KashFlows great accounting software : )

http://www.itsaboutwebsites.com Paul

I think what they are realising is that there are a lot of users who don’t actually know what the address bar is!

I have more than 1 client that I know just types the middle part of their domain name into google and clicks on the top result when they want to visit their own site!
http://www.paymo.biz Jan

I think the real issue is securing good domain names. Pretty much any short & easy to remember domain name has been bought by domain name hustlers, and lately big registrars started doing the same thing. (While on the subject, think twice before checking for available domain names, i’ve seen a couple of cases where someone checking for a domain name found a couple of available ones just to find out the next day that some domain hustler bought them all.)
The other reason i can think of is the fact that people tend to forget domain names, especially if they see a 5sec splash in a commercial. There’s a higher chance they remember some keywords because the whole ad is built around them.
http://www.mattchedit.com/ Matt Chatterley

I’ve been wondering mostly the same thing. It’s kinda clever, but also kinda risky, in some ways.

In the MVA approach, they seem to just have some adwords on the go – great – but I actually missed it for ages, because I was looking at the natural SERPs to see where they landed!

To some extent I suspect it depends on how ‘unique’ the keyword phrase is – I thought Nokia’s “comes with music” was quite a good example of this type of campaign, personally.

That said, the potential for hijacking or piggybacking is there – and although it won’t always be possible (or better said, practical) to do so effectively if the lifecycle of a campaign is relatively short, it’s bound to be something we see evolve over time.

This does hark back to something I often say to customers when they agonise over .com/.co.uk/etc – reserve them all, use the .com – controversial, but a lot of users “assume” that everything on the web is http://www.xyz.com – and deviating from this pattern can cause confusion!
http://www.ozzy.co.uk/ Richard Osborne

I’ve just done a search for “act on co2″ to test this out, and was entertained to see the website in 7th place. Seems you’re spot on with your comment how easy it is for a competitor or similar to hijack this form of advertising.
http://www.turtle-media.com/ Patrick Johnson

The idea is that you type it into the address bar. Type KashFlow into a browser and you will come up with, you guessed it, this site.

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Hijackable Marketing

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