Greed, Milk, Google and Bad Internet Marketing

The other day a friend of mine showed me a video on YouTube called "White Gold". What I found was a video band with a Samson-like, moustachioed lead singer/guitarist accompanied by twin female backup singers/instrumentalists who round out the band 'White Gold and the Calcium Twins." The videos are incredibly over the top, bizarre rock parodies glorifying milk, and the lead singer's hair. I have a pretty bizarre sense of humor, so I was equally amused and confused by the motivation. This 'band' had a handful of big budget, professional videos for their songs, but I didn't get the point.

After several minutes of searching, I found out that this was an ad campaign for milk. On top of the YouTube videos, there was an elaborate Flash website dedicated to "the band" where you can interact with the videos and do some other interactive activities. After I had spent time digging through the site, I couldn't help but think what a waste this campaign is.

First off, the biggest offense to my marketing sensibilities is that at no point is milk really promoted. Thinking back to the "Got Milk?" campaign, milk always played at least a co-starring role, no matter which celebrity it was sharing space with. The problem with this campaign is that milk is simply a prop - part of the joke in making this fictitious band entertaining. You could replace drinking milk with sniffing glue and a consumer audience wouldn't know the difference, they'd just keep laughing or scratching their heads.

In my humble opinion this campaign is the epitome of bad Internet marketing. This, of course, got me to thinking about paid search marketing, and how campaigns can run off course with the same lack of focus. My major problem with White Gold is that the concept seems greedy. They're trying to do too much with a product that is what it is. By getting greedy, they missed the sweet spot (I want to say "cash cow" here but can't make it fit) and I'm certain the end results haven't been increased sales, brand awareness or anything else they were likely hoping for.

This can happen very easily in PPC advertising, as well. I have worked on projects where we initially aim for not just product focused keywords, but a broad set of industry related keywords and problem statements to expand our reach. So, for example, it's easy to think because you sell scotch tape that a keyword phrase like "christmas supplies" might be effective to target, especially if your research tools show that it has a very high traffic volume. Truthfully, sometimes these examples work, and they're worth experimenting with, but I'm a firm believer in discretion. I have a client right now that's looking to grow sales, and we're treading cautiously as we expand the campaign to see if we're getting return on our new ad groups and keywords. The importance of constant testing and ongoing adjustments cannot be overstated.

It would be easy to get greedy from our agency side, though, and push our client into an intense spend, but until you get out and run the campaign, you're really just speculating...and I think recent events should probably warn us of the dangers of that.

The author is Managing Partner of Netvantage Marketing, a Michigan search engine optimization, pay per click management and web analytics consulting company based outside of Lansing, Michigan.