Some years ago, I was interviewing Bob Pittman, the now-departed chief operating officer of America Online and he gave me a golden nugget of marketing advice. Before coming to AOL, he ran the theme park operator Six Flags. When did Disney World have its best year for attendance, he asked me. The year that Six Flags mounted a massive marketing campaign. It seems that the Six Flags ads got people excited to go to a theme park — any theme park — and since Disney was the best-known brand by far, more people headed off to visit the Magic Kingdom than to the parks run by the company paying for the ads. Oops.
I was reminded of that anecdote last night during the Oscar telecast when I saw Microsoft’s new ad for its MSN Search service. The ad doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to begin with as wild music plays and the outlines of various basketball-related images appear inside a search box. The unadorned search box actually looked more like Google’s than Microsoft’s. The words “MSN” and “Microsoft” are not visible during most of the ad but the word “search” is shown during the entire spot. I’m not sure that basketball, or “college hoops” as the ad says in the end, is really of much interest to most Oscar watchers but I guess “March Madness” is around the corner. In any event, though, it seems destined to feed traffic to Google, the best known search site.
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