I believe Super Bowl advertising is on a downhill trend. We are bombarded by hundreds of advertising messages each and every day and while many people look forward to seeing the Super Bowl ads each year, I don’t believe the advertisers messages are making a real impact. Sure, they get headline news for one day after they air, but whether people remember the product they are trying to sell is key and is something isn’t always happening.

While I think some commercials may have missed the target (enough with the cavemen already) one commercial in particular did the best job getting the actual product benefit across. The Tide To Go “Screaming Stain” commercial not only showed the benefit of using the product at a crucial moment, but was also entertaining. That crazy screaming stain got quite a few laughs. Tide To Go has also create a mini site around this promotion which the chance to win prizes daily or become famous by creating your own spoof of the commercial. By the way, this was Tide’s first attempt at a Super Bowl commerical.

Check out Yahoo’s top five Super Bowl commercials and tell me what you think. Who did the best job of getting their product message across?

**Originally published on LevelTen Design Blog.

While I am pleased that it is a topic that gets people talking, I believe many people missed the main focus of my original article. From a marketing perspective, the ads run by Sunsilk that featured blonde haired women facing off against their brunette counterparts, really hit people on a personal level and made their commercials stand out from the average hair product ads. It seems as though these ads helped spark this recent activity on the web, which is a good marketing result for the product.

As a response to the 74 comments, the Sunsilk ads, and my article, were meant to be funny and not meant to be taken as seriously as some of the comments reflect. The ads were not meant to be offensive, and the idea that someone would sue over what these ads say is simply absurd. Of course everyone is going to have their own preference of which hair color they like on a woman, man, whoever. Hair color has nothing to do with brains, beauty or personality. And as far as implying that the actions of famous celebrities are a result of their hair color, ridiculous. I would never want to be put in the same category as some of the celebrities that share my hair color.

I hope that many of you were simply joking with the comments on my article, and that some people got the main point of my article: The campaign was a successful marketing tactic.

Life should never be taken that literally.

People are no longer using the main search engines to locate the information they seek. They are turning to social media, social bookmarking sites, RSS feed-readers, specific vertical search tools, and multimedia. Both large and small corporations have created profiles on MySpace, groups on Facebook and lenses on Squidoo. Of course, traditional SEO techniques are used in these socials media sites to insure that people can find the information you want them to find about your company.

Likewise, the whole element of reputation management goes along with a company’s involvement in social media. Search engines are turning into a reputation management system. You may not be able to control the negative articles written about your company, but the more positive articles your company can distribute through social media sites, the better off they will be. With this comes the fact that SEO firms must be able to manage what is said about their client, both positive and negative, in every media form possible.

As the search engines begin to reach out to social media, they have also introduced their own extension called Personalized Search. Personalized search can basically be summed up as an SEO’s worst nightmare, because individual search results are reordered based on the searcher’s previous search behavior, their home page content, bookmarks, search history, web history and so on. This will have a large impact on keyword analysis since one company could be the #3 result for one searcher and the #11 for another. SEO firms must be willing to adapt quickly as this change is happening now.

In his article, Hedger points out that placing calls to action leading to social or browser based bookmarking and building smarter link/tag networks, along with the traditional SEO tactics, will be the key to optimizing personalized search. So, for all of the companies out there who have not yet gotten involved in social bookmarking, start now.

With this growth of social media, companies will have to rely on the expertise of SEO firms that offer all of the above services as more and more people will turn to these social media sites for information and more engines will offer the dreaded personalized search. Because as we have learned today, the information seeker will always be interested in search, but won’t always be interested in the traditional search engines as their preferred means of search.

**Originally published on LevelTen Design Blog.

This website is a subtle and smart attempt by the California Milk Processor Board to go viral with its milk marketing. Most likely to combat the ever increasing soy milk market. While many times viral sites have the lifespan of a few days and simply lose their “funny” appeal, I believe this site has some staying power. This site has the potential to be passed around from email inbox to inbox with its hilarious mixture of videos, photos, and cleaver FAQ responses.

Here is one example of their carfeully crafted, marketing answers:

Mark from Chicago, IL
Q: Why would aliens choose to abduct cows? Why couldn’t it have been me?
A: Mark, can you produce a deliciously frothy drink that helps maintain strong bones, helps reduce the risk of cavities, helps promote healthy hair, helps rebuild muscles after a workout, may help reduct the symptoms of PMS and if consumed at night, may improve your sleep, not to mention makes one heckuva compliment to fresh baked chocolate chip cookies? If so, you are in great danger.

**Originally published on LevelTen Design Blog.