Google recently announced the winner of the third (SMB) Online Marketing Challenge:
We’re delighted that 3,034 teams from 60 countries participated in the 2010 Challenge, representing an increase of 39 percent from last year and making the Challenge one of the world’s largest university competitions.
The global winners of the Challenge are Lauren Williams, Ganesh Chaudhari, Jeeana Atmarow, Allison Miller, Mohammed Assiri and Hui Min Chua from the University of Western Australia, who promoted the kids’ novel The Adventures of Charlie & Moon. Over the three week campaign, the novel’s website saw a huge jump in visits—nearly 800 percent. The team will visit the Googleplex in Mountain View, California and each of the members will receive a laptop for their great performance in the Challenge.
As one of many strategies, Google is training the next generation of Local SEMs with this effort. It’s also helping to educate SMBs all over the world (60 countries) directly and indirectly about AdWords.
The costs of this global “viral” campaign are relatively small for Google vs. the ROI (I would imagine). Google obviously considers the program a success and is taking it into its fourth year.
April 24th, 2011 at 1:02 pm
[...] Tags or Local Listing Ads) to monetize at the time the program was shut down. Given that their Adwords Online Marketing Challenge is still going, it seems that it might be time to revisit that [...]