i am, but are you?

In their latest add campaign Orange use a serious of individuals speaking about the people who have influenced their lives and made them what they are.  Using the phrase “i am” followed by the individual and how they influenced them.  I actually like the adverts but that is not the point of the post.  On top of the television ads they are also running radio spots which, in the final line, urges users to search “i am” on Google.  So I did just that, I went to my Google homepage and I searched on the phrase “i am”, half expecting to see the whole mobile phone industry lining up their PPC ads.  But low and behold, they weren’t there? All that was there was two Orange listings (the main site and the i am microsite) and a sleeping bag seller, lippiselkbag, who have cleverly engineered the i am message into their creative (nice product, check it out!).

Surely somebody associated with tmobile, vodafone or O2 should have picked up on this keyword seeding and have slotted the keyword into their PPC campaign?  All it would have taken is a bit of creative thinking to get the phrase into their creative and you never know, they may have got some business out of it.  yet another example of big businesses (or their agencies) failing to innovate in paid search.