Monday, January 19, 2009

Marketers capitalize on increasing Satyam search volumes

Identifying an opportunity in the increasing curiosity amongst end users in the current Satyam imbroglio, Pinstorm, a Mumbai based digital marketing agency, designed a tactical strategy to capitalize on the search volume trend for keywords to market their client NIIT Imeperia finance courses.

Agency FAQs article which gives details about this campaign says:

The campaign is still on and some of the keywords NIIT Imperia is using to push the text ads include ‘Satyam’, ‘PWC’, ‘Raju’, ‘Satyam Computer’, ‘Maytas’, ‘Ramalinga Raju’, ‘PricewaterhouseCoopers’, ‘Ram Mynampati’, ‘Rama Raju’, ‘Satyam fraud’, ‘Financial statement Satyam’, ‘Financial crisis at Satyam’, ‘Financial gap at Satyam’, ‘Satyam financial loss’, and ‘Satyam confession’. This implies that whenever any Internet user searches for one of the keywords mentioned above, he will see a text ad for the NIIT Imperia finance course displayed on the right side of the search results page, along with the regular search results.

Quote from the company explaining the logic behind the strat
Speaking to afaqs!, Ansoo Gupta, head, global business, Pinstorm, says, “The idea was to tactically capitalise on the buzz and the rising search volume related to Satyam on Google.com. We knew that we would definitely get the eyeballs once we put NIIT Imperia’s text ads as a sponsored link on the search results page of Google.com.”

Egged on by the article and the fact that the campaign was reported ongoing, I did try the search for keyword 'satyam' (once again proving that people will do anything that they read online ;p)

The results are unexpected. Zinnov and Monster India are doing much better on the keyword 'satyam'. For reasons I am not quite sure of Monster India urges users to "apply for Satyam jobs!" They might as well ask users to go bungee jumping without the bunjee :)

Here's a snapshot of the search:



The campaign guys or Afaqs missed the bullseye on this one? In either case, it is food for thought for online marketers.

Afaqs articles you wanna see:
Who is using Satyam fiasco to run funny or tactical ads on Google [Link]
Amul will now linger on Satyam fiasco [Link]

Update 1: Jan 19 2009 11.03 am
Satyam scam, other big news hot favorites for advertisers (Livemint) [Link]

1 comments:

Asfaq Tapia said...

Just saw this article.. nice post, Hemant :)

Btw, campaigns are routinely run only at optimal times so as to avoid burning of advertising budgets. The only plausible reason for the NIIT Imperia ads not showing up may be because the campaign may have been paused at the time.

Do let me know if you want to do a more detailed post on this. Happy to help fellow bloggers ;-)

Asfaq Tapia
www.Pinstorm.com

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