As Hollie has already said, we’re big fans of the new Sony Bravia bunnies ad. It’s colourful, fun & demonstrates the qualities of the Sony Bravia in a cute way. At the moment the only place you can see the full version of the ad is on their site, and this is where I have a problem with the whole thing.

The whole of the Sony Bravia site, on which the full version of the bunnies ad sits, is built in Flash. This essentially means that as far as the search engines are concerned, there is almost no text for them to read. And despite all the advances in the search engines’ algorithms over the years, keywords are still important (even if they’re no-longer the be all and end all of SEO).

So what, you may ask. Well, this means that anyone searching for the ad using phrases such as Sony bunnies, Sony bunnies ad, Sony Bravia bunnies ad or any of a host of keyword phrases, will find sites that are not owned by Sony (including our own & the personal blog of our Affiliate Marketing Manager James). Whilst this is great in so much as it shows that loads of people are talking about the Sony bunnies ad, it strikes me as slightly silly not to try & build your own site so as to capture the traffic the buzz is likely to generate.

In fact the only phrases where an official Sony site seems to be ranking at #1 for are Sony Play Doh & Sony Play-Doh although the site that ranks for these phrases is a different one to the main site and includes text; however because Sony/Fallon refer to the ad as Play-Doh, that is what it is optimised for. But the fact that there are almost 4 times as many results for pages including the word bunnies, this just goes to show the danger of assuming that you know what words people will use to describe your product (even if the product is an ad). I would have thought it would have been obvious that everyone would refer to the ad as bunnies, rather than Play-Doh.

If there was no way that they could have built the main site to include HTML as well as Flash (just as we did with the new Brylcreem site), then they could have got round this by uploading the ad to YouTube and optimising this to make sure that this ranked in the Universal Search results. A contact at Fallon has explained that they didn’t do this because they felt that launching an ad promoting HDTV in such a low-res environment would not have been the right thing to do.

They’re probably right about that, but it’s even more reason to have optimised the main Sony Bravia site with the bunnies ad on it for search engine traffic.

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