The video, it has to be said from the start, is damn funny. Three WASPs, decked in seersucker and pink polo shirts but carrying thug attitude, get their groove on, give a shout out to “MV—Martha’s Vineyard’, and start rapping about the joys of how good it feels to be a “New England gangsta”.

Straight outta Cape Cod

We’re keepin’ it real

We’re gonna have a party makes the ladies squeal

We’re gonna turn it on

With our parents’ riches

We’ll serve Smirnoff Raw Tea and finger sandwiches.

Think Newport With Attitude.

The “Tea Partay” video, for a new Raw Tea product line from Smirnoff’s progressive adult beverages (PAB) division, hit big in the summer of 2006 and picked up 3 million hits on YouTube, along with a Cannes Golden Lion award and other commercial honors.

So it made sense that Smirnoff, a member of the Diageo beverage portfolio, would want to squeeze more viral mileage from the video in a special promotion last summer to expand the awareness of the Raw Tea product among the target 21-to-27 demographic.

What was new about the campaign, though, was that Smirnoff decided to drive traffic to the content using extensive search marketing–the first time the beverage maker has integrated search into a marketing campaign.

For an initial effort, the results were pretty spectacular, both in terms of clicks and kudos. Thanks to some ingenious search strategies from search firm Outrider, the original video has received about 5 million views to date on both a dedicated microsite and YouTube and at the height of the campaign was getting 15,000 views a month coming from specifically from search engines.

And last month, Smirnoff, Outrider and digital marketing firm Beyond Interaction took home a Yahoo! Searchlight award, given to honor marketing campaigns that have done the best job of integrating search marketing into their toolbox. Thanks to a clever use of search, the online portion of the campaign garnered 600 million impressions and about 2 million clicks during its three-month run last summer.

But even more noteworthy is the fact that Outrider was not able to use paid search ads on Google to drive those metrics. The number-one search engine in the world has rules against marketing alcohol through pay-per-click ads either on its search results pages or on its AdSense network of third-party sites. That rules out of bounds the search engine that saw almost two thirds of the searches done in the U.S. in January. How do you get around that hurdle?

“We had to develop strategies that would increase exposure and scale for the campaigns without having the dominant player in the search space at our disposal,” says Chris Copeland, Outrider senior partner and managing director. “We had pay-per-click ads for the campaigns on Yahoo!, and for the first time we advertised a Diageo brand on MSN. Those were our vehicles.”

The aim was to create product awareness for two new “premium adult beverages” in the Smirnoff product line, Raw Tea and Green Raw Tea, and to publicize an under-the-cap sweepstakes for Smirnoff Ice that would give away concert tickets, bicycles, MP3 players and other summer-themed prizes. Both campaigns were timed to the summer months, when Smirnoff commonly sees a spike in its specialty beverages.

Outrider built lists of keywords that would drive traffic to the Web sites designed for the campaigns: www.SmirnoffIce.com, and, for the Raw Tea products, www.teapartay.com. Some of these key terms incorporated the brand: “Smirnoff Ice”, “Smirnoff Triple Black”, “Smirnoff Raw Tea”. Others were more general (“summer drink”, “party drink”, “summer drink ideas”) although the Smirnoff brand was always in both the headline and the body of the text ad.

When Outrider combined those paid ads with page optimization to make sure the search engines were finding all the relevant Smirnoff pages in a search, the result was search domination. At the height of the campaign in July and August, Copeland notes, a Yahoo! search on “Smirnoff” produced seven listings above the fold for the company and its brands and promotions—five paid and two organic.

“All the added exposure produced an almost five-fold improvement in clickthrough rate for the brand,” he says. “We were seeing a 9% clickthrough rate from all of these listings. That’s pretty decent for the industry.”

Besides bidding on branded keywords in Yahoo! and MSN, Outrider developed a non-branded search marketing strategy that seemed at first glance to be an effective workaround for the Google problem. The firm would bid on terms without the Smirnoff name and use those ads to direct visitors to Web pages like the Citysearch directories, where Diageo had already arranged to place display ads that users could click through to get to the Smirnoff Ice and Raw Tea sites.

Unfortunately, Google did some leg work and ultimately put the kibosh on that end-run tactic. “Google identified who the advertiser was, looked at the content on the page and said, ‘No, you’re not going to be able to do that,’” Copeland says. “But we did wind up driving traffic from Yahoo! and MSN search to these pages where we had already arranged to buy fixed-rate display ads.”

In fact, by bidding on locale-specific terms such as “4th of July Atlanta” and “fourth of July fireworks Atlanta” and driving searchers to the Citysearch pages with Smirnoff display ads, “we generated an extra million and a half impressions off of queries we would never have been able to buy otherwise,” Copeland says.

“We were able to get into the consideration set of a group of people who searched on things like restaurants in a given city or July Fourth activities—things that expanded the exposure of the campaign. And because this program for Smirnoff PAB was all about associating summer time with the Smirnoff Raw Tea products, it was a great way to expose people to these products in an unconventional way.”

Another group of keywords Outrider user to show ads in Yahoo! and MSN related directly to the Smirnoff campaigns, In the case of Smirnoff Ice, the firm placed bids on terms related to the prize giveaway: “backstage pass”, “mountain bike”, “adventure vacation” and so on. Thanks to those efforts and to the Citysearch strategy, the Smirnoff Ice sweepstakes saw 3.6 million impressions during its run and more than 35,000 visitors came to the sweepstakes entry page.

But those results are nothing compared to the jackpot Diageo and Outrider hit with the Raw Tea “Tea Partay” viral video. The 2006 East Coast version went up when the www.teapartay.com Web site did in May and then migrated to YouTube. By the time of the Searchlight presentation last month, it had received more than 5 million views in both those locations.

The video creative was so popular that it inspired parodies and lip-syncs on YouTube. An “answer” rap from the rival West Coast contingent—California “Boyz in Da Hillz” livin’ large, getting dermabraded and drinking a new Smirnoff Green Raw Tea—launched last August and quickly hit 2.4 million views in one day.

Search keyword terms for the Raw Tea promotions got a bit more esoteric than they did for the Smirnoff Ice promotion: “preppy” and “topsiders’, for example. One of the most unexpectedly effective keywords in terms of the number of people who clicked through the ad to the video was the term “finger sandwiches”, mentioned briefly in the song lyrics.

“That term got almost a 10% click-though rate,” Copeland says. “That’s a direct correlation to interest in the video. People aren’t just typing that in by accident; they’re actively searching for that.”

Other keywords such as “funny video” and “hilarious video” also drove visitors to the video not to the Smirnoff microsite but to YouTube.

“That’s where people expect to find the kinds of things that are really entertaining and viral,” Copeland says. “We could have driven them to TeaPartay.com, and for part of last summer we did. But when the West Coast video launched in August, we transferred all those keywords to drive to YouTube. We just felt that better engagement was going to go on there.” YouTube also allowed viewers to share the video with friends, underlining the viral spread.

The bottom line, Copeland points out, is that the search results related to the Smirnoff Tea Partay campaign were as strong as they were because they pointed to online video content that people really wanted to see.

“No one makes a ‘viral’ video,” he says. “People make videos, and if their content is good and captures the imagination of the social community, they can become viral. We were handed a great asset with this video that got out before we were even in place and got seeded through the social sites.”

The Smirnoff campaign and the three other finalists in this year’s Yahoo! Searchlight competition point up the way the use of search has evolved since GoTo.com began letting search engines earn ad money from their results pages back in 2001. In those days and for several years thereafter, search marketing concentrated largely on catching customers who were at the point of a purchase decision.

This year all four finalists for the Searchlight award were brand advertisers; no transactional advertisers made it to the last round of judging, which was done by collecting votes from all the digital marketing attendees at the final ceremony. Audience members heard expert panelists questions the search agencies responsible for the Smirnoff campaign as well as Reebok’s “Run Easy” initiative, FedEx’s Super Bowl 2007 effort and the Members Project, a charitable giving promotion from American Express.

“It’s interesting to see search being used to get in front of people who are learning about brands, products or services from other media,” says Ron Berlanger, vice president of agency development for Yahoo! Search and the driving force behind the Yahoo! Searchlight program.

“The Searchlight awards are only three years old now, but in those three years we’ve seen a proliferation of bigger brands in the competition,” he says. “They’re using search not to sell products per se but to aid awareness and round out the full suite of marketing services. There wasn’t a lot of talk about cost-per-action or return on investment this year. Instead we heard about viral videos, Super Bowl ad exposure and other awareness-building campaigns.”