MVA – just watched a advert for Monsters versus Aliens that finished with the message “search for MVA” . So I did, I searched for MVA and expected a Monsters vs Aliens microsite to be ranking number 1.

Surprisingly, the promotional website for the film site does not appear anywhere in the natural listings. To compensate for this Paramount are running a paid Ad for the film (shown below), however, the Ad has a terrible title, uninviting copy and messy display URL and I’d be surprised if anyone ever clicks it.

No doubt they spent hundreds of thousands of pounds building the flash micro site. Shame no one is ever going to find it!

As punshiment for their sloppy marketing effort I’m going to run my own adverts for the MVA’s search term. My campaign won’t link through to their sexy microsite, oh no, it’s going to link to this MVA post. 

Paramount, if you want to know how to run a your online marketing campaign properly and tie it in perfectly with your offline efforts, please get in contact and I’ll put you in touch with a company that can: eyesnight@gmail.com

(help this post rank naturally by linking to it with MVA as the anchor text!)

Update: 08.04.09
Andrew Girdwood spotted this a few days before I did and Site Visibility echo chambered it yesterday as well.

Update 2: 08.04.09
Two other bloggers picked up on this, Auk SEO posted a nice graph showing the increase in searches on Google that the advert is driving. Traffic that Paramount will have to pay for if people do notice the ads and click on them.

And holistic search demonstrates that paramount are owning even less of the search space in MSN and Yahoo but not running paid adverts at all.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that they have separate domains hosting exactly the same site and are pointing the paid ads at a different domain to the one that ranks naturally. For example the paid ad for “MVA” points at www.monstersvsaliensintl.com/intl/uk/ while a search for “monsters versus aliens” ranks www.monstersvsaliens.com/ number 1 in the SERPs.

I can’t imagine that they are using a whole seperate domain just to track traffic driven by TV ads (as you would with a vanity URL) so guessing it’s something to do with localisation (the /intl/uk part of the url suggests that)…and the content of the two sites is slightly different with one having a quote from the New York Times on the homepage (which on a sidenote was probably paid for considering that the site would have needed to been designed & developed long before the film was released & reviewed)

Anyway, why not point the paid ad at the same site that is ranking in natural search (www.monstersversusaliens.com if you’re getting confused), as you’d expect that site, because it is ranking naturally, would have a better quality score in Google’s eyes and a corresponding lower CPC. And if they needed to create localised versions of the site they have just created country specific pages… i.e. www.monstersversusaliens.com/Uk

I just don’t understand why are they managing two almost identical domains & websites?!

Bottom line, they can’t run either part of a combined digital/offline marketing campaign!