go-Digital Blog on Digital Marketing

How Megan Fox got the equivalent of $50 million of Superbowl ad spending – for FREE! — the marketing of Megan Fox

godaddy superbowl ad spending led to sharp spikes in search volume every February for the last 5 years straight.  Other advertisers who spent on Superbowl ads have similar lift in search volume from the TV advertising.

Source: Google Insights for Search

If you believe that lift in search volume indicates interest and intent and if you consider that each 30-second ad cost $3 million in 2009  (WSJ: NBC Super Bowl Ads to Cost $3 Million) and assuming GoDaddy’s ad did not air more than once, they spent $3 million to get their ad in front of a TON of people and to get people’s attention. Those people who saw the ad and were interested enough to take action went online and searched for more information by typing godaddy into search (see lift in search volume during February of each year) .

If we assume that it took $3 million to generate a certain lift in search we can use multiples to calculate the media dollar equivalent of any lift in search — for example, if godaddy spent $3 million to get X lift in search, then a 2X lift in search would have required $6 million of media (in a very very simplified back of the envelope estimate; it usually would cost more than 2x to get that lift) — i.e. it would have cost at least $6 million in superbowl ad media dollars to achieve a 2X lift in search volume.

So, if we now compare search volume on megan fox side by side with godaddy search volume, we will see that in Feb 2009 Megan Fox was indexing at 21 while godaddy was indexing at 12 (this is normalized to a scale of 0 – 100).  So search volume on megan fox indicates she was getting the equivalent value to $6 million of super bowl media ad spend – FOR FREE — roughly 2X the search volume of godaddy in the same time period.

At the peak of her search volume in June 2009 (corresponding to the release of Transformers 2: The Revenge of the Fallen), she was indexing at 100 and godaddy at 7.  This is 8x the index of godaddy of 12 during the Feb 2009 time period when they were airing their superbowl ads. This implies that she was getting the search volume that would have required the equivalent to a $24 million super bowl ad spend to achieve — again for FREE!

If you want to research futher, use the following link to bring up Google Insights for Search to see relative search volume

http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=godaddy%2Cmegan%20fox&cmpt=q

In February 2008, Megan Fox indexed at 8 and GoDaddy at 8. In 2008, Superbowl ad spots cost only $2.7 million — so she had the equivalent search volume as a paid advertising spending $2.7 million on a Superbowl ad.

In 2007, Godaddy indexed at 6 during Feb 2007 Superbowl. Megan Fox indexed at 43 during the July release of the first Transformers movie — this is an 8X multiple on Superbowl ads that cost $2.6 million — or $21 million

So the perfect “product placement” of Megan Fox in the two Transformers movies garnered her nearly $50 million worth of advertising based on search volume equivalency. This does not even take into account her sustained and increasing search volume, compared to most advertisers’ search volumes which drop right back down to pre-ad levels once the ad is finished airing.

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