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 […]

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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 promoting Tumblr on paid searchVisa 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.”

Visa TumblrWhile 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.


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Ginny Marvin
Contributor
Ginny Marvin was Third Door Media’s former Editor-in-Chief (October 2018 to December 2020), running the day-to-day editorial operations across all publications and overseeing paid media coverage. Ginny Marvin wrote about paid digital advertising and analytics news and trends for Search Engine Land, MarTech and MarTech Today. With more than 15 years of marketing experience, Ginny has held both in-house and agency management positions. She can be found on Twitter as @ginnymarvin.

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