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Forget keywords – Marketing agencies invent words now

11 October 2013

We thought we would inject a little light-hearted content into, what appears to be, a sea of negative commentaries on the Google Hummingbird update. Who needs Keywords when you can invent words for your marketing campaign? 

Much to the annoyance of many SEO and content marketing agencies keywords are now predominantly ‘not provided’ in organic search analytics, making the SEO analysis of your website a cryptic puzzle. 

As other marketing agencies shout their annoyance at this extra workload and plead the importance of keyword targeting, one agency, McCann Melbourne to be exact, have instead chosen to invent and market their own word. And the result is rather impressive.

McCann created an entire content marketing campaign based around a word that essentially does not exist – ‘Phubbing’. As extra evidence of their marketing feat the Australian agency even managed to hardly mention the product they were marketing (which just so happens to be a dictionary) until the final seconds of their video campaign.

The video they produced ‘Phubbing: A Word is Born’ is a factual and emotive story that explains the existence of a phenomenon that has no name. McCann, being McCann (the origin of viral hit Dumb Ways To Die) set out to fill this word void with a name. So let’s take a look at how they went about it.

The situation:

The clever use of content marketing from the marketing agency focused on context rather than content, as essentially the content did not exist. The context they used was the social phenomenon of people snubbing others in conversation in favour of playing on their smart phone. This of course is a common occurrence in most social situations and something we have all been guilty of - so already McCann were on to a context rich campaign. 

The solution:

McCann took it upon themselves to resolve this problem by inventing their own word to describe this social pandemic. ‘Phubbing’ was their solution, created with the help of a few token scientists, phonology experts, poets and a debating champion who were all brought together onan otherwise unremarkable day”.

The humorous and mistakenly informative video not only sells the product but also the idea (context) which has a much stronger hold on the consumer. So on that note, all we have left to say is:

“Marketing agencies your moment has come, you are free from keywords. Go forth, invent and market your context…. but don’t go ‘phubbing’ anyone whilst you spread this exciting news.”

 

 Video: Phubbing: A Word is Born

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Sydney Fleming-Gale

Written by Sydney Fleming-Gale