MediaVision Blog : Search Engine Marketing

Breaking news on the paid advertising scene is Google’s deal with Seth MacFarlane, creator of television gems like Family Guy and American Dad! Gone are the days of Saturday morning Nickelodeon cartoons, as MacFarlane plans to release his Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy exclusively to the Internet in September, and it’s funded by Pay Per Click!

What interests us as a search engine marketing clan, is that Google plans to advertise Cavalcade via AdSense video clips, which will run on their content network. Thus, ads for the cartoons will appear on sites that already update with fresh content and partner with Google to display AdWords, while MacFarlane, his production company and the search engine take a share of the advertising fees. In some cases there will be a “preroll” of ads that viewers will have to watch prior to the clip, and in others there will be a “brought to you by” foreword, which will justify advertising expense.

Thus, Cavalcade will be among the first “webisodes” to breach the multi-million Dollar production mark, and it’s expected to reach much more than that, click by click. For cartoonists, these 2-minute sweetie clips spell money, for a number of reasons. First, they test the waters for possible projects in movies and television, if for example, the audience goes wild for one particular scenario. Second, they escape television censorship and broadcasting constraints (MacFarlane told the The New York Times recently, “I just felt I could be a lot more honest on the Internet,”). Third, Cavalcade is low risk, as there is an abundance of concepts that can be displayed freely, instead of on one network, and ultimately Calvacade can be released in DVD form if the concept catches fire. And in this world of bite-size information trawling, it’s likely that it will.

From a search point of view, Cavalcade converts Pay Per Click from a strategic expense that attracts visitors, to a capital injection in itself that can fund a project. The ultimate objective for paid advertising is the conversion of visitors when they reach a website, and often they get lost on the way. But with cartoon video advertising, the objective is in the click, and with Google’s blended search, it’s easy to factor videos into search results pages. And who knows, later this year we may have the pleasure of experiencing the first ever exclusive Adwords campaign to go viral, with talking cows and genius babies. Don’t say you’re surprised.

p.s. thanks to this site for the cute Family Guy gif