Now, who do you think the artist is behind that angelic voice? Her name is Yael Naim, and she was singing her new song “New Soul!” I would put money on the fact that you had no idea who she was, unless you were one of the thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people to search for her in reference to the MacBook Air commercial, likely in one of the following ways (Wordtracker):

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The official Yael Naim website has absolutely no paid or natural search presence for any of the above keywords. Nowhere on the website does it even mention that Yael was featured in the MacBook Air commercial. Even a very basic page with a video of the commercial, a paragraph of text, and a strong call to action with an affiliate link to the Apple iTunes store would suffice as link bait, getting the website to rank well across the board for related MacBook Air commercial searches. The next step is to retain interested consumers with a mailing list or a MySpace friend sign-up. By failing to fully engage with consumers as they are actively looking for her song (product), Yael is failing to turn “consumers” into “fans.”

Yael Naim did still manage to make it to #2 on the iTunes Top 100 downloaded songs chart on February 2nd, so I will give her some credit. However, by failing to optimize for the way people are actually searching for her and her music, and then failing to capture fans, she is more likely to fade into being a one hit wonder, rather than gaining a cult following and possibly being propelled into worldwide stardom.

I don’t mean to pick on Yael. She is definitely not the only artist or brand that has recently failed to capture the full investment of an on going marketing campaign. Did you watch the Super Bowl? Did you go online to search for the commercials and come to realize how poorly integrated the search campaigns were with the TV campaigns? That is a different post, for a different day!

This article was originally published on The JAR Group blog in February of 2008.