Big Canadian campaign from Sympatico

This ISP/portal prentend to be a efficient SE

[Macguru]

A few days ago, the leading Canadian ISP (Sympatico) lanched an agre$$ive and efficient add campaign on most non-Web medias pretending they are a efficient SE. They are using Lycos/fast/alltheweb stuff. If you are in for Canadian market,I suggest keeping a look on rankings.

[startup]

I hear they are trying to sign up Brett for their campaign. Brett at this point seems to be camera shy, maybe we can get Scott to dig up a photo so we can send it to Sympatico. :)

[rencke]

>efficient add campaign

Seems to have been effective indeed. Sympatico turned up in my February log for the first time ever - a Swedish site in English, not accustomed to seeing Canadian traffic. 0.3% of total traffic for the site - not bad for an exotic newcomer.

[Brett_Tabke]

I get a ton of traffic out of Sympatico - more out of there now, than Lycos. I've yet to identify what trait in my optimization scheme the sympatico'ized AllTheWeb algo is enjoying.

I do know - I love Canada [searchengineworld.com] :-)

[Macguru]

I have never seen such an agressive ad campaing. They have 3 different TV ad, buy full pages 7 days a week in the papers, and they also mail an installation CD to every door in Canada with 2 months of free access. So I bet this Canadian Klondike wont last very long.

One of my friends is working overtime for technical support in a large company, he told me that almost 10% of the staff tried to 'discretely" install Sympatico on theyr PC's at work. Most PC are not even tied to a phone line and they did hit the network big time!:)

As for my best rankings on sympatico.ca, out of 50 first places, I leave only 2 spots for the competition... ( is there an emoticon for an Evil grin?)

Most pages have a very sexy noframes content that was aimed at many SE for the same keywords.

[Brett_Tabke]

Our sympatico stuff trailed off late last week. Anyone else? I assume the ad campaign must have been over on the 15th?

[Macguru]

It was "semaine de relâche" in Québec. No school for a week. A lot of parents also took vacations with the family. My sites are quite local, most traffic come from here or Europe. It was down almost 40%. The campaign is still going on but mostly on TV. They take some slack on print.

Also They have a promotion for DSL acces ending this month.

[grnidone]

This is interesting..I was poking around the sympatico.ca site and did a search. At the bottom, it said "Powered by FAST powered by Direct Hit". I clicked the FAST logo and went to Fast.no.

That's not the interesting part.

The interesting part is when I went to the bottom of the FAST.no page, I found Fast's "FTP search" went straight to FTPsearch.lycos.com and their MP3 search went to MP3.lycos.com.

-G

[Brett_Tabke]

Yes, Fast powers the Lycos FTP search. That was about what got Fast started in the first place. Lycos has a sizable investment in Fast.

At the bottom of the Fast page is "¦ FTP SEARCH ¦ MP3 SEARCH ¦ LISTENING ROOM" - all 3 of those lead to Lycos.