Pontiac is telling people to “google pontiac”, now if only local car dealerships can cash in they could be capturing leads and phone enquiries from this regional campaign.

Last night watching the Daily Show I was quite stunned to see a commercial from pontiac, in which the closing statement was

GM seems to think that associating with such a trusted and generally unbiased brand that some of that might rub off on GM/Pontiac. GM’s head of sales and marketing said in Business Week:

Interestingly this is a regional campaign, I’m in South Florida, and of course the sign off was “talk to your local South Florida Pontiac dealer”. Now one thing local dealers could do is spend some money on some geotargeted ads on google, in other words ads that only display to local people who are searching on google. Right now local dealers could be taking advantage of the massive budget that GM is putting into television and driving people to google, and get some fresh leads direct from their own web site.

To build on an idea that Seth Godin was talking about on his blog, essentially the GM saying “google Pontiac” in their TV ad is going to load up the “google funnel”, but if they are not connecting people to the local dealers its like stuffing people in a funnel with the end plugged up!

You can view the complete ad here:
Full “google pontiac” during the Daily Show 1/19/06

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