Yahoo! Searchlight Award 2007 Winners

Avenue A | Razorfish wins award for “Choose Chase”

Last month we had the pleasure of presenting the good folks at Avenue A | Razorfish as the winner of the 2007 Yahoo! Searchlight Award for their work on the “Choose Chase” campaign.

It was our second year putting on the Yahoo! Searchlight Award showcase, which is highlighted by our top agency partners duking it out for the best advertising campaign that utilize search marketing. The awards are our way of celebrating the creativity and innovation of our search agency partners. Whoever says search isn’t creative, thought-provoking and innovative hasn’t had the pleasure of seeing our clients’ incredible work. We really couldn’t have been prouder of this year’s finalists.

This year Avenue A | Razorfish demonstrated that search campaigns can be used to build brand awareness, and that the message in search creative matters. This campaign made the case for developing “branding” search ads for high-volume keywords. Avenue A | Razorfish proved that a campaign building awareness around their client’s credit card program through search could be just as useful as one that drives users to sign up for the program.

Furthermore, the search creative reflected the branding messaging that was used in other media, both digital and analog. This is an incredibly powerful lesson, as the credit card acquisition space has historically been laser-focused on direct response metrics. The winning Avenue A | Razorfish campaign “shines a light” on a new strategy for measuring the power of search marketing as an awareness-building medium.

The other worthy finalists this year were:

• “Sprint-Talladega Nights,” presented by NeoSearch ‘
• “Special K,” presented by Leo Burnett
• “Lexus. All-new LS Launch, Unprecedented,” presented by Team One

All of the finalists presented  interesting, powerful campaigns, which were augmented by their search marketing components. For example, Leo Burnett’s offline advertising included TV spots, prints ads (in magazines like Shape and People), and re-branded cereal boxes, which all highlighted a very specific call to action: Search Special K at Yahoo!

Yahoo! implemented a custom-branded placement at the top of the search results page for searches on “Special K,” and the links drove users to SpecialK.com and the “Better in ’07” Yahoo! Health pages sponsored by Special K for an engaging brand experience. 

Team One’s Lexus campaign maximized the effectiveness of its online advertising with a holistic search and display campaign that echoed offline brand advertising.

All told, these integrated campaign strategies reveal how well search can work with a wide array of marketing needs. With all the progress we’ve made as an industry, we’re convinced there are still many new ways to make search useful for brands. I am sure that next year we’ll celebrate a new round of ground-breaking ideas that will push the industry further ahead. 

We plan to announce the call for entries in the Fall for next year’s awards, so stay tuned.

— Ron Belanger, VP, Agency Development