“Within minutes of riding on the first trains in Japan, I notice a
significant change in advertising, from train to television. The trend?
No more printed URL’s. The replacement?Search boxes! With recommended search terms!
It
makes sense, right? All the good domain names are gone. Getting people
to a specific page in a big site is difficult (who’s going to write
down anything after the first slash?). And, most tellingly, I see
increasingly more users already inadvertently put complete domain names
like “gmail” and “netflix” into the Search box of their browsers out of
habit - and it doesn’t even register that Google pops up and they have
to click to get to their destination.But, I ask you: could this
be done in the USA? Wouldn’t search spammers and/or “optimizers” ruin
this within seconds? I did a few tests with major name brands and
they’re almost always the top hit on Google (surprisingly, even Panic).
But if Nabisco ran a nationwide ad campaign for a hot new product and
told users to Google for “Burlap Thins” to learn more, wouldn’t someone
sneaky get there before they do?” (cabel.name)
Source: The World
This is pretty old issue, does not mean URL’s are passe as links within search engines still point to URL’s. In addition, it isn’t very smart as what many of these companies fail to understand is their lack of control of search results in search engines. It’s nice as long as you are at the top, howerver, did we all forget Google’s Florida update already?
Over here in the UK, a couple of ad campaigns have used this method. One was the Government’s ‘Act on CO2′ campaign, with the call to action of ’search for ‘Act on CO2”. More from Hitwise here: http://weblogs.hitwise.com/robin-goad/2008/01/act_on_c02_campaign_an_environ.html, but in short, it seemed to work for them.
I saw another ad taking the same approach a couple of days ago. It was also a Government-funded thing, but I can’t remember what. D’oh!
This just highlights yet again why IDN domains are needed and why they will be successful. As the photos in the link show, most of these ads direct native Japanese speaking/writing consumers to visit a search engine and type in a search phrase in, surprise surprise, Japanese (kanji) script. Why? Because historically these brands could not simply direct consumers to a Japanese script URL. That’s changing and changing fast.
It can work on trains and places where you can put a search box, but you still need a url to put in newspaper ads, magazines, tv ads, business cards, and so on.
If ads start to tell people to look for a certain search term, then SEO savvy people can start putting up pages with those keywords to have pages show up when people do their search. Seems a little risky for an advertiser.
The companies cannot control their search engine ranking, yet they result to directing to search results because their customers struggle with ASCII domains.
IDN’s are the solution. However they will not take over until JP-Domains or someone relevant goes on a mass IDN marketing tour throughout Japan. Until then, Japan, and the rest of the non-ASCII world will lag in direct site navigation efficiency.
Nice and VERY informative post Sahar.
GREAT WORK