Prudential Blends TV and Search

Prudential Financial scored a marketing touchdown during Super Bowl weekend with a branding effort combining television ads and search.

A TV spot that appeared during the game was linked to display ads and paid search ads on Google and Yahoo!, according to Jonathan Mendez, director of e-marketing at Digital-Grit, which created the online part of the campaign.

The search ad creative featured the Prudential brand name heavily, and Digital Grit fashioned landing pages that were tailored to the ad's message.

One challenge for the Web campaign was that the demographic most interested in retirement is men 55 years old and up — not highly active Web users — while those most interested in Super Bowl ads are actually women age 18 to 34, said Mendez, speaking last month at the Search Engine Strategies conference in New York. So the aim simply was to reinforce the impression of the ad and ensure the visibility of the Prudential name and its association with retirement planning.

The effort worked even though the commercial originally planned, “Retirement Red Zone,” was replaced by Prudential's creative agency at the last minute with a spot that didn't mention the game or include a Web site URL, Mendez said.

To measure the spot's impact, Mendez used the Yahoo! Buzz tool, which rates the proportion of all Yahoo! searches that contain a given keyword. That revealed the brand keyword “Prudential” was searched 37% more in the Saturday-Monday weekend around the Super Bowl than it had been in the weekends preceding the game.

“The ability of offline media to affect search behavior is unquestionable,” Mendez said. “Search has an important and necessary place in the ad mix.”

But that evolution isn't taking hold everywhere yet, and many of the stories recounted during the session were of missed opportunities for effective search campaigns.

Ron Belanger, senior director for global advertiser strategy and development with Yahoo! Search Marketing, pointed out the two “Brown and Bubbly” spots run by Diet Pepsi during the Super Bowl featuring P. Diddy and Jackie Chan: two eminently searchable names and one URL that were nowhere to be found in paid search ads.