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Who would have thought it? The world’s leading fast food giants made a huge faux pas when it came to their 2017 marketing campaign. ‘That place where coke tastes so good’ was the ingenious campaign to come from the minds of the McDonalds bigwigs in 2017.
Despite how big your brand may be, the need for innovative marketing should never be underestimated. The concept at the heart of this campaign is very clear to those search engine savvy marketers, it’s an intelligent way to encourage the late night viewers who happen to be scrolling their mobiles whilst aimlessly watching TV, to head over to Google and search for,“That place where coke tastes so good”.
It’s an amazing example of audience targeted marketing, however, there are some huge flaws.
Google has opened us all up to a vast amount of free information online. This puts the responsibility of ensuring your site is present for all relevant search queries users may search for firmly in the hands of brands themselves. Google’s search result pages can be a very crowded place and McDonalds latest campaign shows us that even the big players need a helping hand when it comes to being present and visible.
During the TV advert Mindy Kaling encourages users to grab their phone and Google search for ‘That Place Where Coke Tastes So Good’, at first glance, a perfect example of cross channel integration, right?
Well yes, it would be, if there was a dedicated landing page for the campaign sat right at the top of page one of Google. Instead, when you search for the term, McDonalds are nowhere to be seen, doh.
When you consider the huge number of YouTube hits the campaign has had so far and begin to imagine the number of living rooms the TV campaign has been broadcast in, that’s a monumental amount of search traffic McDonalds’ are simply throwing down the drain. Instead page one of Google is largely dominated by news outlets talking about the brand, effectively capturing and capitalising on this spike in traffic for the search term, more fool you McDonalds.
SEO is a slow game and requires a lot of love, attention, and most importantly, patience. When done right, your brand will be exposed to a vast amount of what is effectively ‘free’ traffic.
The ad agency ticked the box, driving people from offline to online but sadly, it stopped there. If you’re unable to achieve that ideal top 3 rank position organically, an integrated search campaign, where SEO and PPC advertising work closely together, will ensure your brand is present. The nature of paid adverts within Google means you can instantly be visible for a search query, the nature of the channel is reactive and the perfect solution for instant visibility when you are not quite there yet organically. This should be a basic requirement if you’re unable to wait for SEO to take effect. A landing page is a minimum requirement, but it appears even that slipped through the net in this case.
When someone is first exposed to this advert, they may be instantly drawn-in to its interactive nature. but it won’t be long until they're left disappointed and longing for a well thought-out and user friendly landing page with a free Coke for all, if only.
Had there been an optimised landing page on the McDonald’s website, news sites and internet users across the world might have linked to it, accelerating and supported its top positioning in search. Instead, there’s a number of tech savvy brands that are over optimising to ensure they rank within search and capture the excess of new traffic.
It’s hard to understand this massive SEO faux pas. This story is actually generating searches and page views that anyone can steal. For digital marketers like us, it's so frustrating that Google's presence has been a massive second thought. The campaign had huge potential and we can only hope that other brands learn from this error, integrated search presence is something brands simply cannot ignore.
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Chris has been at the forefront of eCommerce and a pioneer of online retailing since the early 00s. A 5-time Drapers Award winner, Chris has extensive experience in developing fashion brands online.
Chris founded Cake in 2016. Based in Birmingham, with offices nationwide, Cake specialises in helping fashion brands understand their market online and then helps to develop appropriate strategical direction to achieve their plan, all backed by his 20 years of operating in the retail market.
