Marketers are finding new homes for search ads outside the traditional framework of search engines, according to The Wall Street Journal (subscription required). Striking a goal aimed at cutting costs while still boosting clients' online exposure, marketers are turning to social media powerhouses and internet darlings like Google-owned YouTube.
More online searches are done on YouTube than on Yahoo, the No. 2 search engine, the Journal reports. That shift has prompted brands like Pizza Hut, Universal Pictures, and Monster.com to move marketing dollars away from higher-priced search engines to social networking sites and destinations that generate high traffic from mobile phones.
"Search is being redefined in a lot of different ways," Peter Hershberg, managing partner at Reprise Media, told the Journal.
For example, Pizza Hut has been buying mobile search ads to pitch its products and is creating a promotion and building ads through Facebook to drive interest in a new whole-grain pizza being sold by the chain. Universal Pictures is promoting recent film releases on YouTube, and Monster.com is testing a search-ad program for mobile search on the iPhone.
Search has become the largest category for online ad spending in the U.S. over the last decade, but social networking sites are still having a tough time generating large ad revenue because of the content that often finds a home on such sites. Whereas marketers buy ads tied to search terms on sites like Google, ads on Facebook and MySpace are linked to personal information that users share with others online.
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
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