However, that’s exactly it. They had me. I was so intrigued by the ineffectiveness of the "oohgle" posters that I retained the name for the Sunday evening journey home, overnight and all the way into work on Monday morning. As soon as I was up and running and sipping my pre-work coffee, I tapped the search query 'oohgle' into Google [http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=oohgle].
Good news, I found the website straight-away. Oohgle.com appeared top of the search results. I clicked the link...
Oh dear. A blank page. Head-scratching ensued. Why would a company spend so much on offline advertising only to send a web visitor to a website with no content? I was stumped. But then I started skimming down the other Google results. It appears that I am not the only one that has been thrown by this.
The Oohgle campaign was only conducted offline and yet led directly to a massive surge in online searches for 'Oohgle' - see the chart from Google Insights for search. What’s more, all the search visits came from the UK, and England within that. I am guessing that London was the target region but Google's toolset won't let me refine my search down to that level.
A bit of digging around shows me that I have indeed 'been had', and very successfully, by an offline advertising company. The whole project was one big experiment to help companies in the poster business keep going. So much money has been shifting from offline adspend to online that it appears that Posterscope felt they needed to prove the worth of offline, by measuring its effect on online.
Unfortunately much as the oohgle site appears top of Google for the search 'oohgle', Posterscope is no-where to be seen. Unfortunate really. A massive campaign, proving the value of offline in the online mix has collectively helped the offline communications industry but hasn't really helped the intended beneficiary. Shame, a simple link to themselves from www.oohgle.com would have fixed all that and easily won them some new business.
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Now I don't get out much so I’m incredibly slow on the uptake with new things in London. However, I was in the capital the other weekend doing the tourist thing; visiting the sites, getting squashed on Oxford Street and travelling on the city's arterial transport routes.
So there I am travelling around on a mixture of foot, tube, and train and I see a particular advert everywhere. It was very plain, clearly a web firm (as the ad displayed the familiar search field and magnifying glass), and sounded remarkably similar to a little search engine run out of California, but had absolutely no calls-to-action.
As our Head of Consultancy, Robin helps Coast Digital clients develop and grow their business through expert consultancy, digital marketing advice and guidance. He joined the team at Coast Digital in 2006 and works with the majority of our clients.
Robin has worked in digital since 2000 - seeing in the last days of the .com boom, sticking with digital through the bang and since then, helping to advise companies on their digital developments and strategy.
He has held positions both client-side and agency-side, working with a number of FTSE/NASDAQ-listed companies and international NGOs.
He has worked on all aspects of web – from developing business cases to specifying requirements, designing and marketing websites to running a web management team. Robin contributes to a number of blogs in his spare time.
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