Oohgle? I Did

I was on the Bakerloo line Tube back from Paddington after my Christmas in Paris when I saw this rather intriguing ad. Risking being taken for a lunatic by the assembled tourists I decided to take a photo as I guessed that it would be related to an interesting advertising campaign. And, on getting home and Googling Oohgle (as the creators of the ad very much hoped people would) I was proved right – sort of.

Searching for the word Oohgle leads, via the top organic and paid result, to this site. Essentially it’s a site run by media agency Posterscope designed to prove that people carry out searches based on outdoor advertising, or out-of-home advertising as they insist on calling it (hence Ooogling – get it?) Amazingly for a campaign which obviously has a pretty hefty budget it’s main target is those in marketing and advertising, promoting Posterscope’s PRISM Search analytics tool. That said any ‘normal’ consumer who reaches the site is given the chance to win competition prizes – but as the prizes were Coke loyalty points, I didn’t bother.

Judith has argued that the campaign is obviously working as Google Trends shows a pretty heavy increase in searches for the terms Oohgle. And I’m definitely of the opinion that offline advertising does impact on digital activity and that integrating on & offline marketing is the only sensible way to promote brands in the 21st Century.

However I think what really drives digital activity is interesting marketing and it’s more the fact that the ads played on the Google brand that has driven all the interest, a hunch backed up by the amount of web chatter about the ads. How many ‘normal’ people have bothered to do so is something I doubt any sort of analytics tool could tell you.

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