Diageo’s Fabulous Tanqueray Gin

Diageo is a world’s leading premium drinks business with vast collection of beverage alcohol brands across spirits, wine and beer categories. One of these prominent brands includes the famous Tanqueray Gin(Number 1 Inported Gin in the US). Although not one of their key categories, Tanqueray has become a very popular brand within their umbrella brand equity and portfolio in the North American market.

Tanqueray.com was designed primarily for experiential users. I don’t think task users would need to visit this site for anything. Task users would be more inclined to visit Diageo.com for Tanqueray product information like ingredients or how its made and its history.

Overall, Tanqueray.com is a simple, branded viral type site that is part of their Tony Sinclair brand reposition. I can agree with AdJab’s blog reviewing the latest advertising campaign on this statement: “way better than Bacardi’s ridiculous “Bacardi and Cola” 1970s-style pornstar wannabes. ” I really disliked that campaign. Maybe it’s because I am not a huge fun of Bacardi to begin with. Anyway, the smooth socializing world traveler, Tony Sinclair, is associated with the personality of the site. Through, the site is nicely branded, it could have more interactivity. Having all the TV spots for the campaign is a major plus and I think traditional wins this time. Also, as a 22 year old female, I am not part of the media reach for this campaign, yet I do like it. I must say, Bombay Sapphire’s Inspired Campaign got me much more excited. It’s their whole artistic glass and modernized fashion approach. Reminds me much of the Blue moon still life campaign. Marketers finally realized that hipsters and martini lounge lizards indeed enjoy a fine cold one.

The Tanqueray site is completely Flash-based so it does not include original or easily visible SEO tactics like meta tags right in the open. Search engines are capable of find the site though html title tags.The landing page title tag is simply, “Tanqueray — Ready to Tanqueray? Always in Moderation.” As for actual meta descriptions and keywords, they must be on a hidden file underneath called “labels.xml” (not too sure).

Since visible site content is in Flash, any other actual .html content consists of:
“The Tanqueray, Tanqueray No. Ten, Tanqueray Sterling and Tanqueray Rangpur words and associated logos are trademarks. Imported London Dry Gin 47.3% alc/vol. (94.6°) 100% Grain Neutral Spirits, Imported by Diageo North America, Inc., Norwalk, CT © 2007 Charles Tanqueray & Co., Amsterdam B.V.” This site text can be found in the footer of every page. In addition, the site is linked at the bottom to THEBAR.COM and KNOWYOURDIAGEODRINK.COM ” <-- This is in the footer. Search engines can pick up this text.

A well designed Flash site makes for grand branding experiences, not so difficult to browse but very difficult to optimize for the search engines because it lacks scannable content. In order to optimize, the site most likely embedded strong MetaTags on the initial entry page that is usually html only. On the tanqueray site, this is mainly where visitors focus on just inputing their legal age, but the content surrounding this interface includes html text that search engines can scan as well as MetaTags within the page source. Using the right keywords for items like description, tags, and title names work wonders for Flash based sites. It drives them to the entrance of the site before diving right into Flash content.

On Google’s keyword search, Tanqueray is 5th on the list when you type in the word “Gin”. Tanqueray.com has no paid or sponsored keywords on Google probably due to its viral strategy. The site was more then likely indexed by the Web developers and could have also achieved the Top 10 rating by number of hits that Google’s Web crawler has analyzed.