One Week With Gordon And Frank — So Much To Learn

This whole “Gordon and Frank” thing is offering some really interesting insights into cross-channel marketing.

Not up-to-speed on the saga? Here’s a recap:

  1. Superbowl Sunday — See Bell Beaver ads tagged with “frankandgordon.ca” URL, wonder if they registered “gordonandfrank.ca”. They didn’t.
  2. Register the domain.
  3. Monday, February 6th — write an “article for One Degree” explaining why Bell probably should have bought the alternate domain and point gordonandfrank.ca at it.
  4. Read “the Marketing Magazine article” and realize this is a huge campaign that will go well beyond the Olympics.
  5. Wait for someone at “Bell” or “Cossette” to notice.

So, after one week, where were we:

  • 6,618 pages served.
  • 1,225 people clicked through to the real Bell site.
  • 745 people got here by searching with words like Bell, Beavers, Frank, Gordon.
  • “Bell Beavers” is the most common search term that gets people here.
  • 34 people got here because of Norm MacDonald. A lot of them are angry.
  • Then again, some people love the beavers so much they’re looking to buy Frank and Gordon plushies.
  • The National Post’s Mark Evans “talks to” “Frank and Gordon”.
  • Still no word from Bell or Cossette.

Things we can learn from this exercise:

  1. Typo domains can drive real traffic. Don’t expect your customers to remember exactly what your URL is and help them in any way you can. In particular register variations on all your marketing domains.
  2. Think like your customers. Bell and Cossette might be on a first-name basis with Frank and Gordon but to many of them they are the “Bell Beavers”. Bell should be buying AdWords on that term to get people to the right site and similar terms should be part of their SEO strategy.
  3. Listen to the blogosphere. We’ve been talking about this for over a week now and “others” “have” “been” “pointing” “to us” but Bell has yet to join the conversation.
  4. Check your logfiles. We sent over 1,000 people to the real site in the first week (over 1,600 as I write this). I have to think we’re the top non-Bell referrer but Bell doesn’t seem aware of this.

I love the idea of driving traffic from one channel to another and I commend Bell for doing that. I’m even growing fond of Gordon and Frank (the kids think Gordon — the one on the right — is WAY cooler than Frank). I also commend them for the overwhelming task that a unified all-company marketing platform must be to create. But if we’re going to do this we have to do it so it really works for the customer and that will take more care in the future. So dear One Degree reader, do you see any other lessons to be learned from our little experiment?

Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on February 15, 2006.