Sneaky Digital Maneuvers

In my infamous post on the Snickers' Word Campaign I pointed out that Snickers and their agency had failed to purchase the urls and keywords for the neologisms coined for the ads. It would have been great to see a competitor buy those up and do something with them. Butterfinger could have put up sites with Bart Simpson mooning visitors and shouting "Hey Snickers, eat my shorts!". That would have been on-brand and hilarious, though I'm not sure that the legal teams would have gone along with it. If they were trademarked words, that could have become an issue. I hope that they weren't so lazy they didn't bother to do that, but hey, you never know.

Here is an example of a sneaky digital maneuver I just discovered. Type "hold everything" into Google. The result that pops up in the #1 position is a link to West Elm's website. Hold Everything's site comes up at #3. (It doesn't happen when you type "holdeverything" as a single word.)



I'm surprised you don't see more things like this in the digital space. There is a ton of wiggle-room to do so but most people still don't see the angles well enough to leverage them and most agencies shy away from anything too strategically aggressive or uncharted legally.

A few months back I posted about the video that Motorola is suspected of making and posting on YouTube. In it, a woman snaps one of Samsung’s Ultra Edition mobile phones in half to show how flimsy it is. Did that one go too far? I'm still not sure.