A Guest Blogger Reacts to Domino's
By Nina Hale
As most of you probably know, two Domino’s employees recently posted a video of themselves spoiling food. As a search-engine marketer, I saw some gaping holes in how the company responded to this reputation fiasco. The chain’s response team did a lot of things right: among other tactics, they started a Twitter account, and posted a response video on YouTube after pulling down the original.
But in the first few days when I looked for this response video on YouTube, it took me a number of searches to find it. This isn’t terribly surprising, since not many people had seen it; it was brand new. With fifteen hours of videos uploaded every minute, YouTube has become the second most popular search engine. And like Google, only a handful of results make it to the first page of any search results.
But also like Google, YouTube sells space in the results pages of video searches. An advertiser can bid in an auction to have its video show up alongside and above results, paying only when someone clicks to watch the video. Due to the huge amount of possible viewers (the Domino's response had over 500,000 views within six days), it’s important to set a budget cap, but it can guarantee the video will be seen. A lot of views mean comments, responses, and this means better natural results. Most importantly, the pay-per-click video ads ensure that the company’s message is seen at a crucial moment when the damage is at its worst.
For marketers, the new PPC video ads will be increasingly popular; but right now almost no companies are utilizing this, leaving the field wide open. An important part of viral and video campaigns will be to kick-start it with PPC videos, which can be budgeted more tightly than trying to buy traditional media on YouTube. Plus it’s a pay-for-performance model, so you are ensured views if you spend money.
For any PR or legal group, having a PPC account set up in advance on both YouTube and Google is crucial. You might pay a small amount of consultant or agency fees to create an account and placeholder ad, but most search engines don’t charge you anything until you launch the account. This means you can have everything poised when your message most needs to break through the viral clutter.
Nina Hale is the president of a search engine marketing agency in Minneapolis, Minn.
Comments
Thanks, Nina!
I just posted our first PPC/video campaign. The set-up is seamless. Start the campaign on YouTube and you end up looking at it in your AdWords account. I wonder what will happen to the YouTube "Insight" feature. Thanks for putting this scenario into perspective.
Posted by: Sari Gordon | April 23, 2009 7:35 AM