Who says search marketing has to be dry?

In what must rank among the oddest natural optimization campaigns in history, iCrossing has seeded the Web site of client Batteries.com with a handful of absurd landing pages meant to be discovered through generic battery searches.

The optimized pages contain parodies of ads, magazines and Web sites, using them to make tongue-in-cheek claims about the impact of battery life on such disparate phenomenon as boring home videos and erectile dysfunction.

The pages are unified by a fictional character, battery sociologist Dr. Thurston Schweiger, who offers pseudo-intellectual commentary on the psychological and social impact of battery life. According to his bio, Schweigers family was so poor that he was given batteries as presents and told to imagine the toys they would go to.

We tried to play it for laughs, said Stephen Tortorici, iCrossing’s executive creative director. What are batteries to anyone? Theyre certainly not a fascinating subject.

Read more on this fascinating story at clickz