Mark Beaumont in Orange\'s TV ad

Mobile phone company Orange is currently running a promotion in the UK called “I Am.” The adverts feature people who have achieved remarkable things proclaiming “I am what I am because of everyone.” It is trying to promote Orange Rockcorps, a nice idea that rewards people for helping in their local community by giving them tickets to an exclusive concert.

The purpose of this article, however, is to discuss the advertising campaing itself. Part of the campaign invites people to “search online for ‘I am’.” If you were going to ask people to search for such a generic term on the Internet, you would ensure that you ranked in position number one for it wouldn’t you? Yes, of course you would.

Unfortunately, in the organic search results of Google.co.uk, Orange does not rank in the first position for their phrase. Interestingly, they do rank number one when you search for that phrase on Google.com. UK users are redirected to google.co.uk when they access google.com, so this is the default version of Google that the UK audience see. Back in August, the Orange Rockcorps website ranked sixth in the Google search results, so it seems to have improved since then.

Orange have paid for an ad at the top of the search results page and according to Google’s Adwords tool, you should expect to pay around 46p (pretty close to US $1) for a sponsored result for the exact term “I am.” Presumably, an ad directly above the organic search results would cost a lot more.

If I were Orange, this would not be good enough for me. It is probably safe to assume Orange have paid their advertising agency a lot of money to create this campaign. Anybody who searches for the term “I am” has to either click on an ad which costs Orange money, or skip the number one listing on Google and click one one a bit lower down. Paying an advertising agency to send people to another advert does not feel like a satisfactory advertising campaing to me. I wonder if Orange feel the same way.

The “search online” idea is not exactly a new one (remember the AOL keyword?) but at least in the past companies used to ensure that they ranked top for their chosen keyword.