“SEARCH ‘WRIGHTY’S XI’,” said the call-to-action in the Sun’s latest TV advertising campaign, which aired at half-time in last night’s England match. Could this be the start of a brave new world for SEO?

I took notice: who wouldn’t in the world of search marketing? After all, combining search and TV advertising is probably every SEO’s dream. It could be the perfect marriage between the undisputed power and measurability of search with the untold riches dished out by the TV ad planners.

To be honest, I’m not sure it’s that great an idea. On the plus side, first, it’s true that a lot of people navigate the web via Google, Yahoo or Bing: Facebook’s URL couldn’t be any simpler, but there’s a staggering amount of people out there who search for “Facebook” and click on the relevant search result rather than just type “Facebook.com” into their browser.

(This, of course, is great news for PPC agencies: how many people click Facebook’s paid search ad rather than the organic result? And, sure enough, the Currant has bought “Wrighty’s XI” as a paid-search keyword – kerching!)

The main advantage of this campaign that I can see is it very quickly gets users from TV ad to the correct web page.

Using the page URL – as in traditional ad campaigns: “Visit www.wrightysxi.com” – as the call-to-action would mean more users getting lost en route. It’s not an easy combination of letters to read, for starters. Furthermore it would mean losing the URL-unfriendly apostrophe, which would probably make a lot of viewers, let alone News International executives, very angry.

Saying “Visit http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/fun/competitions/2846279/Wrightys-Final-11-football-competition-Follow-England-to-the-2010-Football-World-Cup-in-South-Africa-Win-a-place-in-Ian-Wrights-XI.html” wouldn’t help much, either.

But what the Sun gains in punctuational accuracy it stands to lose in several ways. Here’s the three main reasons I thought of straight away:

1. Googlebombing
Firstly – and admit it, I’m not the only SEO guy who thought this – there’s the potential for Googlebombing.

Remember Googlebombing? It was great. You basically created a load of links to Tony Blair’s official web page with the anchor text “liar”, for example, and then told everyone to Google “liar”. Up comes TB’s bio! Hilarious.

Google sussed it fairly quickly, but it was fun while it lasted.

Anyway, I’ve just checked www.wrightysxi.com and they’ve only got 227 inbound links – for a News International site, that’s pitiful: they must have 227 websites, for Pete’s sake – and yet I understand the campaign’s been running for a week or so. There’s great potential there for someone to either hijack the search term for their own gain or just have a laugh at NI’s expense.

2. Only limited SEO work has gone into the campaign
Secondly, there’s no SEO work gone into optimising the site for misspellings. Search for “Wright’s 11” and the page is nowhere.

So the Currant is relying on a lot of people remembering it’s Wrighty, not Wright, and knowing Roman numerals. (“Wrighty’s IX” gets you the organic results, but not the PPC ad – Googlebombers take note!)

More SEO work means more budget, so a line has to be drawn somewhere. News International have drawn it fairly low down.

3. There’s a big PR risk
And, whereas the URL will always take you to the page, what if the contest gets some bad PR, similar to the Richard and Judy/Ant and Dec phone-in scandals of a couple of years back? Will searching for “Wrighty’s XI” just get me to a BBC Online news story about the scandal instead?

Ultimately, I think telling users to search rather than visit your URL is more risk than reward. And I can’t help thinking this is just so they could keep the damn apostrophe, ducking accusations that the owners of the Times didn’t know how to punctuate correctly.

And one final point, raised by Martin Belam at currybet.net: isn’t this the same company that’s previously accused Google and Yahoo of being “copyright thieves”?