Spotted! Yanny, Laurel or Best Buy?

Best Buy and Media Experts jumped on a viral online debate last week with a clever search marketing campaign.

In case you missed it, the most searched names on the internet this month were Yanny and Laurel after people all over world debated over an audio recording.

It didn’t take long for Best Buy and Media Experts to swiftly jump on the viral news, creating a keyword search campaign that linked the retailer’s headphones and speakers with Yanny and Laurel searches.

The campaign launched May 17 and will run for as long as search volumes are high, according to a Media Experts spokesperson, who said the”quick-thinking campaign to jump on a hot trend” resulted in high CTR and increased category exposure.

yanny-laurel screen shot

It all started when an audio recording made by opera singer Jay Aubrey Jones in 2007 was resurfaced by a Georgian high school student on May 11, and then found its way on Reddit May 12, before being Tweeted by YouTuber Cloe Feldman on May 14.

Feldman’s post asking, “What do you hear?! Yanny or Laurel” has garnered 91,981 retweets and 218,473 likes to date.

According to Google Trends, keyword searches spiked between May 13 and 19, with the names being searched everywhere from Canada and U.S. to Nepal and Trinidad.