A Paid Search First? Olympic Sponsor Visa Opts To Advertise Its Tumblr On Google, Bing and Yahoo

YouTube and Facebook have long been the favored social accounts promoted by brands in paid search ads. Visa is cracking the mold. In what may be a first for a major brand, the Olympic sponsor is using paid search to drive visitors to its Tumblr account. The ads are appearing on both Google and the Yahoo Bing Network.

Visa also appears to be the only major Olympic sponsor to have made Tumblr its Olympic content hub. From its Tumblr account, Visa links to all of its other social channels and features video and other content assets that are distributed across the other networks, including Facebook where it has over 12 million fans. Search monitoring firm BrandVerity said it has tracked Visa advertising across a number of Olympics-related keywords such as “Olympics games,” “Sochi winter olympics” and “sochi 2014.”

While it may not be the very first, Visa’s move could be a sign that Yahoo’s billion dollar acquisition is becoming important enough to brands that they’re willing to pay to drive traffic to their Tumblr accounts. However, it’s likely to be a slow move. In SERPS related to “Olympics ads,” Visa is taking the more traditional approach of driving users to its YouTube channel.

Kellogg’s, AT&T and McDonalds are among the other major Olympics sponsors buying ads on the search engines to promote their Olympics participation, television commercials and content.