Crafty

According to Ad Age (registration required*), General Motors exhibited rare savvy in preparing to counter Ford's Super Bowl ad campaign for hybrid cars. It was widely known in advance of the Super Bowl that Ford would be launching a campaign featuring Kermit the Frog. GM knew and and prior to the Super Bowl, flooded the web with ads for their hybrid vehicles but embedded the meta tag "Kermit" in the ads. GM's goal was to influence search results so that anyone searching the web after the Super Bowl for "Kermit" - presumably in search of information on Ford's hybrid vehicles - would find that the top returned result was to information about GM's hybrid vehicles. Ford created and financed the Kermit campaign, and GM exploited it at virtually no cost. In some areas of life I'd find this sort of trickery distasteful, but in this case, among competitors in the market place, I think it was pretty crafty.

*Ad Age, like many other news sites, requires users to register in order to read content. If you're like me, you can't be bothered with this, particularly if it's not a site you visit often. Fortunately there's an easy way around these registration requirements. Bug Me Not provides a free database of usernames and passwords for thousands of websites. Simply insert the web address of the site requiring registration and Bug Me Not will provide you with a list of usernames and passwords that will get you in. Suck it, registration overlords!