What the heck is oohgle?
Posted by johnb | Posted in Uncategorised | Posted on 19-11-2008
Tags: Uncategorised
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Apparently oohgle is "Out of Home Google".
So there I was driving home from work tonight and saw a poster (billboard) at the side of the road. It was an entirely green poster and across it’s diagonal was a graphic of a browser search box (you know the thing top right of your browser window) with the usual magnifying glass and the letters ‘oohgle’ in it.
Perhaps it was the geek in me that reached out for my iPhone and punched the letters into my search box to find out what the heck it is. The search results (including paid advertising for the term just to be sure) take you to oohgle.com which describes ‘oohgling’ as:
"When you see an Out-of-Home ad and then follow it up online, you’re Oohgling. Out-of-Home advertising is great at creating interest and intrigue and that’s often followed up with an on-line search to find out more."
Well it certainly intrigued me in and I ‘oohgled’ for the first time – i’ve done it before but I didn’t know there was a name for it!
Anyhow, it appears just to be a marketing campaign for a company named PosterScope about some tool that analyses the relationship between OOH and Search. Interestingly enough using any search engine apart form Google doesn’t seem to return any results (at the time of writing) otherwise i guess it would be called oohyah or something perhaps?
But it’s interesting how such a simple poster which essentially gives nothing away about the brand/product (obviously) intrigues people and gets them to search for it when they get home – therefore creating the link between offline and online marketing – something that most traditional ‘marketeers’ have struggled to grasp especially in these times when getting a good ROI and being able to accurately measure a particular campaign is so important.
Can we expect more advertising just of search boxes with terms in them?
…or maybe you’re just odd.
I saw the same thing … 2 posters one green and one purple. The inner geek knows it’s a marketing scheme but is too curious NOT to look. It works dammit, it works. But you take a nice side ride on the traffic obviously by blogging about it =P
True. I saw it on london underground’s projection screen and searched it on yahoo mobile.
I agree with Neil…
Interestingly, searching “oohgle” on Google brings up your blog above the official site! Try it.
I noticed that you had top link! Quite funny that… a site that devoted to marketing COMPLETELY forgot about the online market sid of things… or maybe thats the point… who knows.
yeah, funny huh?
They only registered oohgle.com 2008-03-06 whereas this domain was registered 08 Dec 2000! So I think I win purely based on that fact. A great lesson in SEO (search engine optimsation) can be learnt from this and it seems like they should have known better as they’re trying to sell a tool!
From an SEO point of view they’ve done everything right in their code – of course I can imagine that my post ranking above their site is skewing their results slightly…that’s what happens when you build a business based on search! luck of the draw!
from their site…
“Posterscope’s Prism Search tool helps advertisers understand how well their OOH campaign achieved this and which bits worked the best.”
clearly not this one!!
Lots of ads in Asia don’t give URLs, just the search terms to use which (should) bring up the site. A little like the old AOL keyword days, I guess.
I’m not convinced by this tactic. Sure it worked this time, but I doubt they have solved the problem of linking above and below the line marketing. I’ve written my thoughts about it on my blog, but essentially I think they’re making a pretty big mistake and entering the market with a fad. Now is not the time to be introducing unproven fads.
not a problem now though as clearly the outdoor campaign has started to gain some traction and search has now optimised against the correct site. Loving this clever little bit of research that will undoubtedly show the power of search combined with Outdoor.
[...] I was going to go on to blog about something else and it’s implications to what I do but instead I’ll give some further link weight (in case it still counts for anything) to this post about oohgle. [...]
This has me wondering more about ways of utilising “oohgling”.
More to the point – I hope you did’t use your iPhone whilst driving! This is EXTREMELY DANGEROUS.
I find the concept extremely effective. I’m currently sitting on a train and saw the poster out the window, just a search box with a pixellated mgnifying glass and the word “oohgle” inside. Immediately I’ve reached for my web enabled mobile and searched for it out of sheer curiosity.
I work in media and consider myself pretty much impervious to all kinds of marketing, but this simple tactic worked like a charm on me.
They also seem to have improved their SEO somewhat as they are now the top link on google, which quite frankly is the only seach engine anyone should care about…