MediaVision Blog : Search Engine Marketing

An anti-corporate advertising evangelist paid Columbia Records to run a PPC campaign on their home page. The ad text he chose stated: “Major Labels Are Obsolete/ R.I.P or learn and thrive/ Music. Tech. The New Music Business”, and displayed a link to their home site, which promotes a vague new music industry – presumably a communist one. The point was to promote relevant ad placement, while supporting those smaller web masters who are often forced to pay their bills using advertising that is not congruent with their sites’ messages.

The “new music business” is one I’ve discussed at length with Moth and some sound engineers of my acquaintance who have some very interesting things to say about syndicating the ‘quality of the bona fide recording’ and sorting through blurred music nomenclature. But what interests me more is the idea of using pay per click advertising to prove a point - in this case, that incompatible advertising is unacceptable.

To my mind, if this ‘ad evangelist’ has chosen his route using Google as the medium, the point would have been a much more resonant one. First, he’d have had to test Columbia’s organic searches (something like “the walking eye” or “music label recording”) and chosen one as his target route. In order to hit the “corporate” music industry as a whole, he could have chosen keywords that produced the most number of said corporations in the first SERP, and made his point to a much wider audience, rather than those who visit only one corporation. For the record (sorry), my interest in jamming ad placement is purely SEM academic, and I take no public stance on the music industry’s turmoil! Second, the evangelist would then bid on his chosen keywords – but offer to pay an exorbitant amount, so as to ensure placement – and craft his ads so that relevant keywords appeared, but the message was still ‘anti-corporate’.

In this way, PPC could be a platform rather than a pathway, as it would offer a message. One likes to think that Google or the victims of these pranks would shut down the offending message quickly – although, it took Columbia three days to remove the “Major Labels Are Obsolete” ads. A mere screenshot is all a visitor would need to submit to a social media site in order to propel the bad press ad infinitum. Often if a joke is good enough, it does the social media rounds, and then it re-appears for a second, third and fourth run, because there are that many people online.

I think the moral of the story here is to keep an eye on your website, and know about the searches that concern you. A website is not a static creature, and no matter how good your intentions online are, it’s still an open forum, and there is mud everywhere.