Scorpion Pushes MULO Advertising Earlier in the Journey
Scorpion is expanding its Google Ads offering with Demand Gen, giving multi-location brands another way to reach consumers before they actively search for a nearby service provider.
Paid search has long been a cornerstone of local customer acquisition. A consumer searches for a nearby home-services provider, attorney, pest-control company, or other service, and brands compete to put the appropriate location in front of that customer when intent becomes explicit. For multi-location brands, however, that may be too late to begin influencing the decision.
Scorpion is addressing that earlier stage by adding Google Demand Gen to its advertising offering, pairing it with tools including AI Max, Broad Match, and Smart Bidding. The combination allows brands to reach potential customers across YouTube, YouTube Shorts, Discover, and Gmail before they initiate a service-related search.
For multi-location marketers, that raises an important allocation question. Search remains essential for capturing demand around individual locations and service areas, but brands may also need to invest upstream to ensure consumers already know or trust them when local intent emerges.
Getting Ahead of the Local Search
Demand Gen uses Google’s AI to identify consumers demonstrating relevant signals of interest and reach them across Google’s visual properties rather than waiting for a specific query. Google data cited by Scorpion suggests those campaigns reach consumers beyond the audience exposed to traditional search advertising, with 68% of Demand Gen conversions coming from people who hadn’t seen the advertiser’s Search ads during the preceding 30 days.
That doesn’t establish that Demand Gen caused every conversion, but it suggests brands can reach a substantial pool of customers outside the conventional paid-search journey. Consumers may encounter a brand while watching video, researching a problem, or browsing before an immediate local need develops.
“If you’re a major brand in your space, Demand Gen is a must,” Ashlie Kim, SVP of Advertising at Scorpion, told Street Fight. “As consumer journeys become more complex and digital, brands need to be able to reach the right audiences with the right message across the entire purchasing journey. Demand Gen gives our clients another powerful way to do that.”
For multi-location brands, the objective is to become a familiar option before the local search happens rather than another unfamiliar result competing for attention once intent has already formed.
Creating Demand at Scale, Capturing It Locally
Scorpion isn’t positioning Demand Gen as a replacement for search. Google reports that advertisers adding Demand Gen to Search or Performance Max have seen an average 14% increase in conversions, supporting a strategy that combines earlier-stage demand creation with campaigns that capture consumers once intent becomes explicit.
For multi-location brands, those campaign types can operate at different levels of the customer journey. Video and visual media can establish familiarity across national or regional audiences, while search responds to intent around specific locations, markets, and service areas.
That can be particularly relevant to franchise systems. Corporate marketing may create awareness and consideration across the brand footprint, while individual locations ultimately need leads, appointments, calls, or customers. Connecting those investments turns brand-building and local performance marketing into different stages of the same acquisition strategy.
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Video Gets More Local
Demand Gen also brings video more directly into the MULO performance-marketing mix. Google says 45% of U.S. YouTube Shorts users aren’t on TikTok and 65% aren’t on Instagram Reels, potentially giving brands incremental short-form video reach.
The opportunity for distributed brands goes beyond producing one national video. Home-services companies can showcase completed projects, pest-control brands can address seasonal problems, and other service businesses can demonstrate expertise before consumers begin comparing local providers.
For multi-location organizations, core creative and messaging can be developed centrally while services, seasonal needs, and calls to action reflect individual markets. Scorpion is producing the video and display assets required for its clients’ Demand Gen campaigns, addressing one of the operational challenges of extending visual advertising across a large location footprint.
Connecting Brand Demand to Local Conversion
Demand Gen also illustrates how AI is expanding the addressable audience around local markets. Search captures consumers who explicitly declare what they want; Demand Gen attempts to identify potential customers before they make that declaration.
That makes measurement more complicated. If someone encounters a brand on YouTube and ultimately converts through a location-level search ad, evaluating only the final interaction can give too much credit to the channel that finished the journey. For brands and agencies managing distributed media, understanding how national, regional, and local investments work together becomes increasingly important.
The significance of Scorpion’s expansion therefore isn’t simply another Google campaign type. For MULO brands, it points toward a more connected acquisition model built around brand-level demand creation, market-level consideration, and location-level conversion.
Search remains critical for capturing local intent. The larger question is whether enough future customers have encountered the brand before they search for a nearby provider and whether the appropriate location is ready to capture them when they do.
