It was reported this afternoon that the union Unite is planning to use Google AdWords as part of its campaign to highlight what it believes are poor employment practices on the part of Marks & Spencer. As The Guardian pointed out however (& as I discovered when I checked myself) the ads don’t actually seem to be showing up.

However that doesn’t mean that the campaign has been a failure, in fact far from it. Because with the rise of universal or blended search, news of the campaign is hitting the front page of Google anyway. When you do a search for Marks & Spencer or M&S, at the bottom of page 1 are a bunch of news results, with The Guardian story on the planned action in pride of place. Now whilst this isn’t quite as good as getting an ad at the top of the page, it will still attract significant numbers of eyeballs, and at no real cost.

If Unite had been really savvy they could have created videos ( and uploaded them to YouTube) as well as images, press releases and blog posts, all optimised for the phrases Marks & Spencer and M&S and, in this way, could have potentially taken even more of the results. So next time you’re thinking of taking on the ‘man’ (although I still find it hard to think of M&S as anything other than a gentleman), you may be better off spending your money on PR & SEO than PPC.

Update: As with the recent post on the Scientology demonstrations, this is not meant to be in any way political, but is, rather, interested in the aspects relating to digital marketing. So any political comments probably won’t be published, simply because this isn’t the right forum for them. If you have feelings on those issues there are plenty of places which are suitable.

Header image: kamshots on Flickr

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.