Jason Murphy

First Nike, Now Google Does DaVinci!

Apr 23, 2006 Search and SEO

Ok, the majority of the search engine marketing industry was wonderstruck with PubCon this week, and most of us had heard this was happening, but on Monday, April the 17th, the Google sponsored DaVinci Code “Quest” launched on an actual Google hosted redirect at google.com/davincicode. And yet a lot of us missed it. Or at least didn’t think it was important to mention.

Do a Google search for “davinci code” AND “google” and you’ll see what I mean. I found one faithful SEO’r informing us of the launch, and he found it on a digg story published on April 13th–with over 1200 DIGGS as of this writing! I also see it on clickZ, who wrote about it on the 18th, the day AFTER the launch. Joystiq, a gaming blog, discovered it on the 16th, although didn’t follow-up to tell us when it went live (and they most likely didn’t have to). There are many other bloggers and marketing sites mentioning it, but hardly any SEO sites. I’m suprised that nothing appeared on SearchEngineWatch, or DigitalPoint forums, or SearchEngineRoundtable (oops, see below. -ed) or several others out I frequent. I thought many other Search Engine Marketers would get a kick out of this marketing partnership Sony Pictures has with Google. So no one is talking about it. It’s not even a week old yet. No big deal.

I just finished reading the book myself. I hate getting spoiled by a movie before reading a book so I decided to finally add to Dan Brown’s royalties and buy the book (since I would be seeing the movie for sure). Now I’m all caught up in the hype. After finishing I want to know more. I have questions and theories and am thirsty to dive into any online community discussing the book and its facts vs its fictions. So, the first thing I do is jump online, go to Google and type DaVinci Code. I find in the sponsored ads that Google has a deal with Sony. More specifically that Google is sponsoring a game that Sony developed. Ok, no biggie. Sounds like fun (and it is, seriously)! With most of its programs Google puts a “sponsored ad” or, as we know them, an Adwords ad using their own inventory. Search for “DaVinci Code” and it is the first ad. No big deal. They’ve been doing this for years. Search for their known brands “Adsense”, “Adwords”, or even for “Maps” and you’ll see google ads. This is expected of them. They have the inventory, they want to be sure you get relevent results, what better way to do it than to have the first sponsored ad in case for some reason their index results doesn’t give it to you. So no big deal.

But here is something I potentially do see as a big deal. Below the sponsored ad, before the first indexed result, lies a vertical search result. Most of the time this spot is for vertical results for the searched term within finances, images, local, news, froogle, etc. Google is just trying to do their job and give you the info you are searching for. But this time, when searching for “DaVinci Code” it was an ad. Not a Froogle ad to buy the book either. No, it was an ad for their sponsored game with Sony that stated “New! Crack the Code: Play the Da Vinci Code Quest on Google.” See the picture below:

Ok, I’m typically laid back and don’t like to make too big a deal about things, but this vertical search gets me thinking. Did Sony pay google enough that they actually did a guaranteed inclusion for the search term? Are there other search terms? Did they guarantee a set amount of traffic to sony? Did sony play a flat fee or are they paying per click for that listing? Are they paying anything at all? Are they going to be doing more of this in the future? Are they doing more of it already and I’m not seeing it?

Its silly to be asking these questions, because Google owns the page and can do what they want. But I feel this opens a lot of possibilities to corporations in the future.

“Dear Google, how much would a guaranteed vertical inclusion for “Cpayscom Online Casinos” cost? Thanks, Jason.”

[UPDATE: I erred. SEroundtable DID in fact mention the DaVinci Code Quest. Sorry Guys! -Jason]

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