I am… retarded?
A month on from its launch, I’m still consistently amazed by the poor execution of Orange’s recent advertising campaign. There are a number of these adverts to be seen on billboards everywhere, which generally consist of cod philosophy statements such as:
People are just better together. I am who I am because of everyone.
Bleugh. It’s just a mobile phone network.
Anyway, beyond the sheer gut-wrenching self-satisfied, clever-cleverness of these adverts, the thing that has got a few people’s attention is the addition of a subtle little “search online for ‘i am’” in the bottom left.
What? No URL? But how will we remember to Google it when we get to the office? Well besides the fact that the advertising campaign is instantly forgettable for all but this niggling little thing, I thought “fair enough, they’re trying something new, and it’s to do with search so that must be good”.
So I did remember it and Googled ‘i am’. So apart from the sponsored link at the top, where’s their website? Surely months of planning and meticulous execution have gone into the organic SEO for this campaign? Apparently not. The first time I searched online for ‘i am’, their website was hovering at #70 in Google, just below a site called ‘arseiam.com’ - how ironic 
Even now, this site sits at #6 in Google, below the #1 result i-am-bored.com, and is nowhere to be seen on Yahoo or Live search. Astoundingly, Orange did not see fit to do home page takeovers on any of these other sites. Surely if you can’t dominate the natural listings you can buy your way onto the destination pages of other sites that rank better than you?
So here’s a couple of pointers for future offline ’search online for…’ billboard campaigns:
- Make the advert interesting - make people want to search for something to find out more.
- Create some kind of mystique around the campaign. Take some pointers from Nine Inch Nails, who did a great online treasure-hunt style campaign last year.
- Give something away for FREE!! Provide an incentive for people to look for your site.
- If you’re lucky, people will search for your term on their iPhone or smart phone - help them want to by giving them entertainment (see point 1), a reward (see point 3), or instant gratification (make of that what you will).
- Choose your key phrase wisely. Don’t allow it to be pushed down from the top. Have meetings about it. Look at the competition for that phrase, and ask yourselves “are we good enough to rank #1 for that in every major search engine?” Don’t let the answer be “no” or “maybe”.
- Plan and execute a great SEO campaign before you spend any money on offline advertising. Look at dominating the SERPs for your chosen term.
- See point 1.
According to mad.co.uk, £30 million is going into this campaign. Come on Orange, you can work miracles with that kind of cash can’t you (and your PR7 main site)?
Note: Of course I’m not going to link to this abysmal site, but it’s
- i [dash] am [dash] everyone [dot] co [dot] uk
August 21st, 2008 at 3:38 pm
After getting off to a bad start this campaign seems to be getting worse - Justin Billingsley, brand director of Orange UK, suggests using a search call-to-action rather than a URL is a logical step. “We’re trying to get the maximum number of people to see this campaign, so we can ask them to remember either a URL or just two short words,” - by that I think he meant two short stop words…
September 6th, 2008 at 12:34 pm
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