Just saw something surprising on a Pontiac commercial: They flash the Google home page and say, “Google ‘Pontiac’ and find out what’s new,” or something like that. It went by in a second but I was amazed. Note that they didn’t say, “Go to Pontiac.com,” which tells me that they must believe that most people don’t put in addresses, they Google to get where they’re going. Once upon a time, sites tried to become keywords on AOL and then a few poor souls bought RealWords (that was what it was called, wasn’t it?). Those were closed taxonomies and their days are over. Google, of course, is open to influence. And so Pontiac is open to Google bombing. Imagine if Dell advertised to find its site via Google rather than an address. We could all link to this and it would be what’s new for Dell.
: UPDATE: Steve Baker says this is why he’s using Ask, instead.
