SERFing on the AOL Wave

By Jeff Campbell, VP Product Development

Today's SERF will be AOL.com. Happy SERFing folks!




Be sure to add your findings/comments on AOL.com to this post. Check out/add commments on last Friday's SERF of Live.com here.

1 comments:

Unknown said...

In using AOL for my searches, I set off challenging myself to like it. At first, the long list of vertical listings threw me off and made the page seem a bit cluttered and unstructured. However, as I searched on general branded and non-branded terms, the use of images and quick links between the Paid and Organic listings really broke up the page and enticed me to spend a few more seconds reading the ad. For the term 'New York' the visual was a map of New York and the surrounding cities--something I actually spent some time looking at. When I searched 'New England Patriots', a good sized logo appeared--something that made me excited for this week's game. The singular use of an image not only provides great branding/re-branding opportunities but also a way to establish an emotional connection with consumers. If I was touched by the Patriot's logo just imagine what you could do with a visual of vineyards in the Napa Valley or a sunset on a beach in Hawaii. Though other engines are incorporating visuals in their ads, AOL's size and placement seems to have the most branding power. I didn't find much of a difference between ad revevance between engines but, the more I searched, the more I became fond of the prominent visual, it’s point of differentiation and the way it attracted me to the ad every single time.

 
Copyright © 2008 Resolution Media, Inc. All rights reserved.