Comments on: Hijackable Marketing

By: Patrick Johnson

Patrick Johnson — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 22:31:55 +0000

The idea is that you type it into the address bar. Type KashFlow into a browser and you will come up with, you guessed it, this site.

By: Richard Osborne

Richard Osborne — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 14:14:51 +0000

I’ve just done a search for “act on co2” to test this out, and was entertained to see the website in 7th place. Seems you’re spot on with your comment how easy it is for a competitor or similar to hijack this form of advertising.

By: Matt Chatterley

Matt Chatterley — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 13:32:34 +0000

I’ve been wondering mostly the same thing. It’s kinda clever, but also kinda risky, in some ways.

In the MVA approach, they seem to just have some adwords on the go – great – but I actually missed it for ages, because I was looking at the natural SERPs to see where they landed!

To some extent I suspect it depends on how ‘unique’ the keyword phrase is – I thought Nokia’s “comes with music” was quite a good example of this type of campaign, personally.

That said, the potential for hijacking or piggybacking is there – and although it won’t always be possible (or better said, practical) to do so effectively if the lifecycle of a campaign is relatively short, it’s bound to be something we see evolve over time.

This does hark back to something I often say to customers when they agonise over .com/.co.uk/etc – reserve them all, use the .com – controversial, but a lot of users “assume” that everything on the web is http://www.xyz.com – and deviating from this pattern can cause confusion!

By: Jan

Jan — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 09:55:30 +0000

I think the real issue is securing good domain names. Pretty much any short & easy to remember domain name has been bought by domain name hustlers, and lately big registrars started doing the same thing. (While on the subject, think twice before checking for available domain names, i’ve seen a couple of cases where someone checking for a domain name found a couple of available ones just to find out the next day that some domain hustler bought them all.)
The other reason i can think of is the fact that people tend to forget domain names, especially if they see a 5sec splash in a commercial. There’s a higher chance they remember some keywords because the whole ad is built around them.

By: Paul

Paul — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 09:34:44 +0000

I think what they are realising is that there are a lot of users who don’t actually know what the address bar is!

I have more than 1 client that I know just types the middle part of their domain name into google and clicks on the top result when they want to visit their own site!