FutureSearch Circa 2002
Yesterday afternoon’s panel, Futuresearch - Watch This Space, brought together an unusual mix of Market Makers and Marketers to discuss some of the biggest opportunities in search. Mainly, it served as a review of the same issues that marketers have been tackling for the past several years.
Jane Butler of Google, and Jen Dorre of Microsoft represented the Market Makers (my description, not theirs), while Grazia Ruskin of chip maker AMD, Lauren Coberly of Kodak, and David Kidder of Clickable represented the Marketers. The session was moderated by Jeffrey Pruit of iCrossing.
Two themes dominated the session:
1) There is a convergence of search, display and other advertising.
Jane Butler of Google identified that 86% of superbowl ads this year contained URLs versus 50% in the year before showing the increasing synergies between media types (I’m not sure that makes a trend, I’d like to know what the numbers were in 2000—comment below if you know the answer). Several panelists described the move towards integrated tools for marketers to plan, place and measure many types of media.
Jen Dorre highlighted a Microsoft Mantra, “The Power of 2”, that means search and display are better together. They’ve found that you’ll see a 22% lift when display and search are run together.
2) Multi-Channel reporting or Engagement Mapping. How do you look at the whole sales process from awareness, to purchase intent, to actual sales across all forms of media. Search may be the last click, and is so credited with a sale, but does that understate the role other media played in the process.
Jane Butler says Google envisions a broad CMO dashboard where you could see how all of your marketing efforts impact the sales cycle. That is the direction they are headed, but are not there yet.
Microsoft has a similar vision, according to Jen Dorre, where they provide the tools that allow marketers to credit the entire series of touchpoints in the marketing process.
Interestingly, the MSN representative identified that one area where they stumbled with the launch of the new AdCenter platform was in servicing industry experts. Now, they are focused on providing tools and training paths to nurture and serve these industry experts in the future.
As more of an agency services business, David Kidder of Clickable was sort of the odd man out of the panel. He started by surveying the audience asking “Of those doing SEM, how many are spending more than $50k per month?”. The breakdown was roughly 40% spending greater than that amount.
Two things David mentioned stood out to me:
First, as part of a strategy to increase their online visibility in SEO, they pay for long form detailed answers to questions that they scrape from forums and feeds. Not revolutionary, but interesting and one of the few specific tactics mentioned in the session.
Second, that this article from the Harvard Business Review, Eager Sellers and Stony Buyers: Understanding the Psychology of New-Product Adoption had a big impact on their approach to client promotion. Among it’s observations was that increasing complexity has a huge negative influence on the likelyhood of users to switch products--meaning that all those new features in your application, may make your job competing even more difficult.
If you are already well-versed in trends in online marketing and the challenges faced by nearly everyone in the industry there were no revelations from this session. Digital is at the core of media strategy today. With that comes issues of measurement and tracking effectiveness across channels. New tools, APIs and features are coming from the major players to help you.
