Sunday night before the Simpsons (a new one written by Ricky Gervais of the original, British version of "The Office", FYI), we're flipping channels and I catch the tail end of a segment 60 Minutes is doing on Tiger Woods. At the very end, there's a promotion, showing Yahoo!'s search home page (not the usual Yahoo! home page) and telling viewers to search for "Tiger Woods" to get exclusive access to more footage produced for the show that was not put into the hour segment. Sure enough:
Even more interesting, the announcer notes that this is part of a deal 60 Minutes has put together with Yahoo! that will start full-time in September. I don't know the exact details, but this is very similiar in format to AOL's old "AOL Keywords" program (remember when every TV ad said "go to www... or use AOL keyword x").
This would appear to be a new kind of intersection in search and traditional media, and it shows me that TV folks are getting smarter about how people use the web. TV viewers don't "remember" web addresses (and even when they do, they still type them into the search box - particularly Yahoo! and CBS' demographics). People remember search terms and subjects, so the "search for X" is a natural response.
Note to SEOs - it is possible to buy the number one listing in natural results as of this deal - I just wonder how much 60 Minutes had to pay (or whether Yahoo! was the paying party in order to boost traffic numbers?!).
UPDATE: Broadcast & Cable has details on the partnership.
And this is what Ask should be doing if they ever hope to gain ground in this battle. Planet of the Apes ads do not get people moving. Promoting "extras" like Tiger Woods video does.
To Yahoo I say Bravo! To Ask I say - strike two on the marketing campaign.
"I just wonder how much 60 Minutes had to pay..."
My guess is that Yahoo is the one doing the paying. If they can get the world to stop saying, "Google it!" and start saying, "Yahoo it", that would be a huge win.
Interesting... They send them to Yahoo - to search - instead of sending them to their own domain. They don't own sixtyminutes.com and they must not want to give big front page space at cbs.com or cbsnews.com... but 60minutes.com will redirect you to their 60 minutes page at cbsnews.com.
I am trying to understand what the real win-win synergy is behind this. Seems to blurr the 60 minutes brand.
Maybe two competing news agencies can get greater reach by cooperating.... The multimedia version of the "reciprocal link". ;)