The Blog of Ross C Brown

Last month, Orange in the UK started an advertising campaign titled ‘I Am Everyone’ with a number of outdoor print ads and a television ad.

Interestingly, Orange didn’t publish a website url with their campaign, instead Orange issued the call to action, ’search for i am online’ with both their print and television advertisements. 

I’m guessing that the thinking behind this is that using a ‘call to action’ is better than just feeding someone a website URL with the hope that they might look it up later.  Furthermore, remembering website addresses is hard – like really hard – whereas a two letter term is much easier.  Let’s take a look a the results.

I first went over to the good people over at Google and searched for, as instructed by the ad:

And Yahoo:

But Windows Live Search didn’t have anything.  Considering that a lot (of misinformed) people use Live Search I’m sure Orange will be losing out.

There are some disadvantages of using this method.  Users have grown wise to the sponsored ads on search engines and countless surveys show that natural results are trusted a lot more than those in the sponsored area.   You will also note that the natural results for the term ‘I Am’ is not very complementary to the campaign with the first natural result being  titled ‘I am Bored’. Another disadvantage is that unlike giving out a website address, sponsored ads cost a lot of money – possible more than investing in SEO for the website.

Finally, using an system accessible to anyone with a credit card to market your website is not that wise.  A spineless immoral marketer is free to bid on Orange’s term ‘I Am’ so that their ad would appear along side Orange’s ad.

In this example, one of those immoral and faceless corporate marketers has launched a campaign targeting the phrase ‘i am’ to promote a blog. For the record, the ad might not show as I’ve set a really low budget (less that £500/mo) and the bid amount for the ad is a quite a bit more than the £0.05 minimum.