Burger King has captured the flame broiled essence of a Whopper and put it into a cologne for men. And of course they have a hilarious website to go with it. Genius. I can’t wait to see how Hardee’s answers. And PETA for that matter.

 More at their “Fire Meets Desire” website and a Yahoo Shopping article here. Too bad they are already sold out for the holidays, that would have been a great “white elephant” gift.

Microsoft revealed a study today that offered some insight into SMB paid search marketing behavior, and more importantly, their thoughts on the topic. The study showed that most SMBs still struggle to understand paid search engine marketing, and many had fears about price, ROI and time commitment. Some key findings:

• Nearly nine in 10 (89 percent) feared keywords may become too expensive.
• Eighty-one percent questioned if paid search marketing is the best use of their marketing budgets.
• One quarter of respondents believe paid search marketing is too complex.
• Twenty-one percent thought it would be too time-consuming.
• Thirty-five percent felt they would need an agency to help set up a search marketing campaign.

So in more “Google is getting greedy with ads” news, Google appears to be testing running ads in Google Search Suggest. Only select users will see this update while they test it out, but here is a screen grab from Search Engine Land:

From an advertiser and a user perspective, I’m not happy with this change. Usually Google strives to make changes that benefit users and contribute to thier financial success. However, this just looks like pure greed to me. It’s way too easy for a user to accidentally click on an ad that hovers right below the search box, creating not only user frustration, but a potential wasted click for the advertiser.

You can now geotag posts in Blogger drafts. Geotagging allows readers to browse content by location on your blog. This is a great feature for local businesses that use Blogger as a marketing tool for thier business. For instance, suppose you are a landscaper and you use your Blogger blog as a portfolio of your work, showcasing different lawns and patios that you’ve designed in various posts on your blog. Now you can tag each of your posts with the appropriate city and state, so prospective clients who are browsing your blog can sort by city to view landscapes that you’ve designed in their area. This will naturally help with SEO efforts as well, since you’ll suddently have a number of posts tagged with useful information about the services your business offers, plus your service area. 

As we can see below, this feature is also integrated with Google Maps:

It’s important to note that you have to login to http://draft.blogger.com to use this feature. You can read more on this feature here at the Blogger in Draft blog.

On Monday the Google Adwords blog announced that they would permit Adwords advertisements that promoted hard liquor to the U.S. This is a follow up to their decision in the fall to permit beer ads.

“This fall, we changed our policy around beer, for the first time allowing advertisements of its sale in the U.S. via AdWords. And starting today, in response to advertiser feedback we’ve received over the years, we’ll permit the advertisement of hard alcohol and liqueurs that target the U.S.”

Or maybe it has something to do with the economy…

Anyway, I thought it would be fun to see what our local (now quasi-local) brewery Anheuser Busch was doing with PPC. I ran a couple searches on “beer” and “mmm beer.” I was disappointed to see that no one is bidding on “mmm beer” because that would be my search of choice.

Then I began to wonder if Bud Light has clickability, not just drinkability. I searched “light beer” and this is what I saw: 

My analysis is that this particular ad doesn’t have much clickability. Thoughts?

This is pretty darn funny – especially given that it was put out by a company who I can’t say I’ve seen anything fresh and creative from in quite awhile. I hope we see more of this light-hearted, youthful flair in their brand during the next year. In times like these, you’ve got to find a way to reinvent yourself and get noticed.

http://bewareofthedoghouse.com/

And can I put a plug in for their spend $25 get $10 off coupon they’ve been sending out lately. Another great way to pick up some much needed foot traffic.

According to The Economist, online advertising will be relatively unscathed during the economic downturn. EMarketer agrees that we will still see growth in online ad spend, but has revised their growth projections for search advertising from a predicted 14.5% growth in 2009 to a 8.9% growth rate in the new year.

Some of the arguments: “Online marketing increasingly aims for awareness, consideration, preference and loyalty all at once…Marketing managers can therefore defend their online budgets as being both above and below the line.” And in relation to traditional forms of advertising: “All this makes spending on [online] advertising much less speculative, so that it starts to be treated instead as a cost of sales.”

San Diego Calc teacher sells ads on his tests to recoup money lost in budget cuts. Brilliant. I’m just glad I’m finished with school because my mother would have bought a large banner at the top of the test threatening me to fail another Calc test…

Or as this author puts says, search as we know it is dead.  Search becomes social, essentially:

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/industry/4259135.html

And apparently Microsoft is working on just this thing, with collaborative searching:

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/industry/4292830.html?page=2 (see #7, collaborative search)

My mind’s too simple to make sense of it all, but it looks like there are some big things coming.

So I want to whine and kick and scream because this hasn’t rolled out to my Google account yet, but Google launched SearchWiki today. Instead of testing it, I have to sit back and envy others who are using it and tweeting about it.

Here’s an article on Mashable about how it works: http://mashable.com/2008/11/20/google-searchwiki/

According to Mashable (and jerks who already have the feature), SearchWiki allows you to re-order search results, remove or add links to the search results page, and leave notes with any listing which others will be able to view.

Wow, major changes.