Even though I hate Pontiacs (and I can say that as a former owner of a really awful Firebird) I went ahead and Googled them as soon as I was in front of a computer. At the time, which was the day after the ad aired, Pontiac.com was the first sponsored listing in Google, but Mazda was also bidding. And there was a Pontiac enthusiast site as the first organic result.

I had surmised (incorrectly, it would seem) when I saw the ad that Pontiac must have an expert team of SEO folks ready and waiting to keep bidding and optimizing, optimizing and bidding, for the next few months. We all know how fickle the engines are, how crazy bidding can get, and how hard it is to maintain favorable results. It would seem that right after the ad aired, Pontiac did NOT know exactly how things worked. I was really surprised.

Now when I Google "Pontiac", the official Pontiac site is first, followed by all Pontiac ads in the rest of the paid placements, and Pontiac.com is also first in organic results, followed by other Pontiac enthusiast sites. This after Pontiac presumably got schooled pretty quickly on what exactly has to be done to get the results they had hoped from a Google search, and after Mazda got its hands slapped for bidding on a competitor's trademark. This also extended into Yahoo's search and resulted in a new policy on trademark bidding by Yahoo.

The other side to this issue is the incredible boost to enthusiast sites and, bringing it all back to affiliate marketing, auto affiliates. I'm thinking that online retailers like JC Whitney and its affiliates have got to be loving that people are being driven to the search engines in droves from a medium as effective and expensive as television ads, especially SUPERBOWL television ads. (Though I suppose the other side of the coin is that this is driving up the cost of Pontiac keywords.)

Using Google as a marketing tool in television ads may have its flaws, but it is exciting to think that traditional marketing mediums are thinking of search engines as powerful, marketable options for selling their products.