Live Search Advertising Gets Creative …and Confusing

November 15th, 2007 Search Engines

I was visiting my old blog, Net Business Blog, (now belonging to Adie Cooke - great guy) when I noticed an interesting little Kontera adlink for Live search.

Live Search Advertising Gets Creative

So here we have a Kontera advertisement for Live search (which I’ve seen a TON of those on sites running Kontera) that is targeting the keyword “Google”. Hm. That’s interesting.

Why the hell would Live be targeting “Google” for their search ads? Unless I’m missing something and this Live search ad is some sort of automated system that simply targets random keywords and pops up a “learn more” search box - in which case this would be a hilarious coincidence.

However, I don’t think it works that way. It looks to me like Live is specifically targeting the keyword “Google” for their Kontera ad campaigns. Okay, so why?

The only reason I can come up with is brand recognition - Live wants to be mentioned (on sites running Kontera) whenever Google is mentioned. And in this case not only is Live mentioned, but the way the ad is setup there is no doubt that it is a search engine.

But that doesn’t seem like much of a reason to me considering there are so many better (more generic) terms Live could be targeting to push search traffic. Terms that people may actually naturally do a search for.

But what do I know?