Imagine’s “google it” campaign


10.22.09 Posted in Marketing by Barry

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Mass cam­paign run­ning at the moment from Imag­ine (Great new web­site), who are rolling out wimax technology.

So I “googled” WiMax, and obvi­ously enough they are run­ning an AdWords campaign(as are others) — but I’m inter­ested in the actual usage of the phrase “google” as it’s a trade­marked term and Google get a lit­tle pinicky if using it as a verb, hav­ing issued cease and desist in the past.

It’s will be inter­est­ing to see if the big G gave approval on it’s usage, as they can be quite vig­i­lant of their trade­mark usage, pos­si­bly as a pre­cau­tion­ary to the lessons learned from “Hoover”.

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  • Just noticed a billboard on the way home from Galway myself. Wouldn't it be funny for someone to post a completely fabricated 'imagine' diatribe and get it to rank for [wimax]. Anyone with enough juice want to throw a post up and we'll all link to it.
  • @topgold's blog was ranking this morning, http://www.insideview.ie/irisheyes/2009/10/wima... and mine ranks in pages form Ireland (given the lack of relevance to wifi my blog has) : http://primaryposition.blogspot.com/2009/10/wim...
  • I sent a quick message to - @imagineeurope "Thanks Barry,glad you like it! Google support WiMax all over the world so "Google it" was a perfect way to get our msg out there!"

    Not clear if Google give the green light, but as they're backing WiMax, I presume they're OK with it.
  • I saw this too and I wouldn't be surprised if one of their competitors wouldn't spot an opportunity here. After all, it is probably a low cost per visit, therefore you could use their URL to mask your own and replace their ad, thus taking their traffic. Google lets companies do this all the time - its very frustrating and I have no idea why they allow two different urls to be used in an ad. But they also only allow one ad with the same visible url, so if they bid an extra 0.05c higher, Imagine's ad wouldn't even show....Risky and not well thought out maybe? Or do they have an internal Google Account Manager to fix it for them?
  • I think this is a risky ad campaign. People might feel slightly insulted because they're being ordered by some company to look something up on the internet. The ad could be perceived as "Don't know what wimax is? You're an idiot. Get back to me when you've looked it up on Google."

    I quite like the web site though.
  • barryhand
    It could certainly imply that, on the other side - it's probably difficult to explain in a poster/billboard why WiMax is the new sliced bread.

    The one thing I do like about this campaign is driving traffic to the website, which has been really well built with good content.
  • barryhand
    I don't know about that Ciaran, it's a fairly uncompetitive keyword, so would be fairly low cost. There's only really been a surge of searches in the last few weeks as well (Google Trends) - http://www.google.com/trends?q=wimax&ctab=0&geo...
  • Ciaranmg
    If they're running a sufficiently big PPC campaign on google then I reckon the big G are happy to turn a blind eye to this one. Everybody has a price.
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