The Lorenzo VonMatterhorn Experiment

This post will make the most sense to people who are familiar with Neil Patrick Harris and his show called ‘How I Met Your Mother‘ (the link is to a Web clip from the episode called ‘Lorenzo VonMatterhorn’).

The reason the AdWords strategy I’m going to tell you about works is thanks to comedy, viral Web search, and Google Trends.

Traditional Media Drives Viral Search

People are still watching lots and lots of television. They may not be picking up as many newspapers or magazines, but millions still tune in to prime time TV.

The other night I was watching one of my favorite shows called ‘How I Met Your Mother’ with my wife, and we were just rolling in laughter. Neil Patrick Harris plays a character called ‘Barney Stinson’, a shameless womanizer who nevertheless comes off as charming and hilarious. This episode centered on Barney’s attempts to pick up women according to his signature ‘Playbook’.

Enter Lorenzo VonMatterhorn.

Barney described in ridiculous detail his ‘play’ that involved building a huge — and totally fake — Web presence around a fictional character he named Lorenzo VonMatterhorn (Barney encourages the audience to come up with their own fictional name so they can play along).

Next, Barney spots an attractive women in a bar who has a smartphone and sidles up, saying, “Yes, it’s me.” The woman is confused but also intrigued. Barney pretends he cannot believe the woman is unaware of his fame, mentions his name — even spells it — then says he’s refreshed to meet someone who hasn’t head of him and goes to order a drink.

Finally, the woman checks out this mysterious character on her smartphone and, long story short, leaves the bar with Barney.

This episode was designed to drive people onto the Web. Think about it for a second. Hilarious show with plenty of sight gags + Focus on the Internet + A ‘Watercooler’ conversation starter = Humongous number of web searches.

Online Video Growing Exponentially

TV is the baseline for popular entertainment, but Online video is driving the growth in the way people consume entertainment. Just consider Read Write Web’s article about the record number of US Internet users viewing Online videos.

So now we’ve got these two forces, traditional media plus Online content, that both drive millions of searchers to their Web browsers every day.

If you have the foresight to understand what people are going to be searching for based on events as simple as a TV show, you can use the following guerrilla strategy…

Capitalizing on Google Trends Using AdWords Advertising

I’d like to take credit for this idea, but my friend Andrew inspired the whole thing. We were talking about the show because we both love ‘How I Met Your Mother’, and he told me there was an AdWords ad that appeared when he searched ‘Lorenzo VonMatterhorn’.

–> Lightbulb Goes Off Inside My Brain <--

I thought to myself, "Hey, I can do that too!". There was only one ad showing for the phrase, so I put up the following AdWords advertisement:

Now keep in mind, I didn’t make time to create a custom landing page for this ad. The people who clicked on it were directed to my Joe Mescher Services Page. My idea was to position myself in a playful way as the creator of the Lorenzo VonMatterhorn websites. I didn’t expect to profit off the strategy, instead I just wanted to test it out to see if the idea would work.

Check out the results and see how well the ads performed (over the space of about 6 hours):

That’s 1,488 ad impressions (times the ad was shown to searchers) and 2 clicks for a total cost to me of $0.22. Think about how you might use Google Trends to help you create a unique ad campaign of your own! If you’re motivated to put a bit of effort into designing a custom landing page and have a compelling hook, there’s no telling what you might achieve.

Let me give you an idea of what an AdWords ad like mine looks like in the context of a Web search:

To set up your own campaign, you need to do the following:

1. Sign Up for Google AdWords
2. Keep an Eye Out for Interesting Content and Stories
3. Search Google Trends to Confirm Popularity
(hint: You should not wait to bid on keywords until the trend appears in Google necessarily).
4. Set a Reasonable Budget with Appropriate Geo Targeting

What AdWords campaigns can you start to promote your product or service — or personal brand? I caution you to keep the advertisement relevant to the keyword you bid on. My ad may have been playful, but it used the search term in a relevant way.

(psst…if you need a little help boosting your own business or personal brand, check out Social Brand Solutions, a project I started to help people ‘Look Good on Google’).

Tagged as: Google AdWords