Thursday, July 03, 2008

Gasta News: Brand turf war

Paid Search:Low intensity warfare on Google plains

Agencies aren't practicing what they preach when it comes to using paid search to market their brands, according to Adweek, and while these agencies are sleeping, some of their smaller competitors are using paid search to their advantage.

Buying your brand name would seem logical, but of the 56 agencies assessed by Adweek, only five had sponsored links tied to their names on Google. The others did not have paid search links, but their web pages generally appeared near the top of the search results.

"It's very difficult to recommend certain things to your clients if you're not in the game yourself," said Craig Conrad or Interpublic Group's Campbell-Ewald. "So often we're focused on our client business [that] sometimes it's easy to forget about our own brand."

While brand advertisers are up in arms over Google's lack of enforcement when it comes to piggybacking, it seems that some smaller agencies are actually using the practice themselves. A search for OgilvyInteractive yields a sponsored link for Stein Rogan + Partners, a small New York agency.

"Why not put ourselves out there as a viable alternative?" said Tom Stein, Stein Rogan's CEO. "It's a little bit of counter-marketing."