Paid Search and Your Brand

Moderator Barbara Coll of Web Mama (and president of the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization), Kevin Lee of Did-it, Kevin Ryan of Wahlstrom Interactive and Fredrick Marckini of iProspect have spent so much time on the road together speaking on the same search marketing panels in recent years, their patter has the delivery of a troup of vaudeville performers. For a bunch of über-geeks, there were plenty of laughs. (Chris Bowler, of Agency.com’s iTraffic division, also spoke on the panel, though he was new to the team so - although he provided ample insights - he did not partake in the insult humor of the rest of the group.) Nearly every seat was filled for the Tuesday afternoon session, the last day of the show.

“Wait a minute,” I hear some of you thinking (yes, I have ESP), “branding through search? Give me a break!” In fact, the panelists made a powerful case that search had an important role to play with branding. In fact, the session was so dense with different observations and opinions (not to mention potty humor and inside jokes), I’ll just bullet-point some highlights:

• The panel agrees (more or less; lot of petty squables, but mostly on the minute nuances) that both paid and natural listings are important. Kevin Lee says that if you’re really interested in having a brand presence in search results, you ideally should have a presence in both the natural and paid positions
  
• Fredrick Marckini: “From a marketer’s point of view, there are two outcomes on a search [for a business]: they find you, or they find your competitor.”
• Along those lines, Chris Bowler observed that a key thesis of the morning’s keynote by Roger Blackwell that brand marketing is primarily a protective activity, making sure that you remain in people’s consideration set when they are planning a purchase
• Debate ensues about the click behaviors of searchers, as to whether they are more inclined to click on paid links or natural links. Marckini cites some iProspect research on the subject (see “Key Findings” 9 through 12 of this PDF report), while Ryan makes the point that it has much to do with what kind of search mode the searcher is in: commerce or information. The former lends itself to paid lisitings, he says, vs. the latter to natural results.
• Coll makes the point that this is the only search-related panel at the show, despite the fact that search advertising now accounts for some 35%-plus of online advertising spending according to the IAB (not to mention the same proportion of companies on the AdTech vendor floor seemed to be search specialists). Someone notes there are four search-related panels scheduled for AdTech NY in November
• Bowler says that although search prices are getting continuously more expensive, defending one’s brand on the search engines is simply “part of the cost of doing business, part of the cost of having a web sitre”
• Lee points out how some companies are using cross-promotional tie-ins for new relevancy on search engines, such as Coke’s relationship with American Idol or American Express’s relationship with Tiger Woods enabling those companies to enrich that brand relationship by keying ads to search terms for those popular cultural icons
• Not surprisingly, the IAB’s new research about the brand-power of search was alluded to on the panel, though because it had not been released yet at that time it was not discussed in details
• Marckini notes that the greatest challenge of leveraging search’s brand marketing potential is that no one involved in branding is involved with search campaigns. As if to underscore the point, he asks for a show of hands as to how many people in the audience (roughly 150 or so) work “on the brand side” of marketing. Not a single hand goes up. (To be fair, the sessions was running at the same time as another called “Brand Marketing in the Attention Economy”)
• Lee pointed out what was to me the most compelling argument for why brand marketers should pay attention to the brand impact of search; he described what seems to me to be a highly likely scenario of a company introducting a new product with an expensive TV campaign, after which consumers go to Google to learn more details about the product only to be led astray by wiser competitors who have placed AdWord ads while the manufacturer of the product in question have not. That is, you are spending the real money to simply let your competitors close the deal
• Similarly, several panelists note that PR drives a tremendous amount of search behavior, something few PR people seem to take into consideration, for example when writing press releases with concern to their keyword impact on later searches. Marckini notes that search is naturally a PR function, “as it’s an inquiry-related activity”
• Not only are your words being searched, panelists note, but also your web site’s images, your products in shopping search engines and every other aspect of your company’s online experience
• Ryan doesn’t miss the opportunity to mention “adult diapers,” which has become a running joke among the vaudevillians on the panel (prompted when another panelist intones, “it depends…”)
• Ryan also notes (more than once) that the most popular use of the Internet is “complaining about movies and exchanging pornography”
• Ryan, who seems most determined to bring the panel down to gutter, also mutters something about “nipplegate” in a discussion about the unpredictable impact news events can have on search behaviors