Die Hards Stay On for the Paid Search and Your Brand Roundtable

I was pleasantly surprised at the number of attendees staying on for the last session. Hard to believe these polite, attentive (if a bit tired) people were the same riotous crowd from last night’s Blue Lithium party. In some way, it feels good to be part of a group that might turn on you in a second. Keeps you on your toes.
Barbara Coll, President of SEMPO (Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization) moderated a panel including Kevin Ryan of Wahlstrom Interactive, Kevin Lee of Did-It.com, David Karnstedt of Overture, and Fredrick Marckini of iProspect.

Despite the fact that the table was rectangular rather than round, the session jumped right in to the question of whether it is really important to be number one in search. Kevin Lee’s comments reflected the general consensus - it depends. The overall marketing strategy, current position in natural search, and the level of control desired over your messaging influences the importance of being number one.

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Integrating Search Into The Cross Media Marketing Mix

On the final day of AD:TECH, only the truly dedicated show up for the sessions. And, during this final day the focus turned towards search. In the 10 a.m. session, Integrating Search into the Cross-Channel Marketing Mix, moderator Gary Stein of Jupiter Media began the discussion by suggesting we think of a marketing ecosystem, rather than a mix. Stein feels the word Mix overly simplifies the myriad interactions between each media.

Stein went on to set the stage with some statistics about the evolving search marketplace. Notable were:

• Search marketing is becoming more complex, and marketers are taking a more comprehensive approach. The percentage of search advertisers targeting more than 1,000 phrases grew from just 4 percent in 2003, to 22 percent in 2004.
• This growth in complexity is a driving force for analytics solutions and management tools.
• There is a disconnect between marketers goals and the measurement of results. While nearly all marketers seeking direct sales acquisition measure results of their efforts, few with brand awareness goals do the same.
• Large marketers, defined as those with greater than $1 Million annual budgets, are gaining as a proportion of total search advertisers.

Mike Bruno, Director of Online Marketing for D&B Sales and Marketing Solutions, described a qualification process they use for search-derived registrants on ZapData.com. It went something like this:

1. They first identify whether new registrants on the site are already D&B customers. If so they route the contact to the existing D&B point of contact.
2. If the lead is identified as a high potential client, the contact is routed directly to D&B telephone sales.
3. Contacts of unknown potential are routed to phone pre-qualifiers for follow up.
4. Low potential clients are routed into a sophisticated email trigger system to help filter out those of significant value.

One way they identify the potential quality of the lead is by the search terms they use when finding ZapData. Broad based phrases which indicate a client need, but not a particular solution, fall into their Interest category, Progressively more specific phrases are categorized as Consideration, Performance, Action, and Loyalty. The leads even more qualified than the Loyalty category were described as the “Glenn Garry Leads”. Bruno did not specify whether coffee in the office was for anyone but closers.

WR R WE W MOBILE MKTG?

The Mobile Marketing Super Session was ironically interrupted by a loud rude cellphone conversation in the back of the room. Nevertheless, some good trends and information made their way through the chatter, with a general sense that mobile marketing has moved from 1999’s hype to 2004’s reality.

Jim Manis from m-Qube gave a nice overview of the exploding market for SMS. 2.5 billion messages sent per month in the US, virtually 100 percent adoption among teens with enabled phones. Lots of brands are starting to integrate SMS into marketing mix, especially in entertainment. Jim contended that the best use of mobile was as part of the integrated mix, with websites, point-of-sale, packaging, etc. driving the SMS promotions.

Carrie Himelfarb from Vindigo then followed up with the sexier side of mobile—content and applications on the phones. She nicely categorized the uses of mobile (I love numbered lists) in order of importance to consumers.

1. Communication; SMS, greeting cards
2. Expression; ring tones, wallpaper
3. Entertainment
4. Help; weather, directions

On the flip side of the numbered list phenomenon was the amazing coincidence that not one, but two of the presenters offered “Top five” lists which actually only had four items. Jill, if you’re reading this, can you let the AD:TECH audience know what the fifth reason to incorporate mobile into your marketing mix is? Your slide only had four.

VC Investment Panel: What’s Hot and What’s Not

The VC Investment Panel identified what’s hot and what’s not in the VC world.  Moderator Rich LaFurgy noted that VC funding is heating up and shared data about VC and IPO activity in New Media showing which area are hot and which are not (the numbers represent deals done in Q1 and Q2 2004):

Hot
            VC       IPO
Search       9         1
Email       8         1
Adware     1         1
Network     1         1

Warm  
            VC       IPO
Content     5         1
MRM         4         0
OOH Media   3         0
Rich Media   2         0

(MRM=Marketing Resource Mgt)
(OOH=Out Of Home)

Cold
            VC     IPO
Agencies   2         0
Int. TV     2         0
Streaming   1       0
Promotions 1       0

Watchlist
            VC     IPO
Wireless     2       0
Mkt Optimiz 2       0
Verification 2       0
Affiliate     1       0

Panel members were Deric Emry(ABS Capital Partners), Mark Kvamme (Sequoia Ventures), Rosiland Resnick (Axxess Business Centers), Fred Wilson (Union Square Ventures) and Deven Parekh (Insight Ventures).  Apparently things have heated up to the point that VCs are worrying we’re back in bubble-land.  As one panelist noted he asks himself two questions:  Are we doing silly things (his answer: “no”) and Are we paying silly prices (“getting there”).

Web Publisher Issues

The Web Publisher session was moderated by Michael Zimbalist, director of the Online Publishers Association, with panelists including Scot McLernon, EVP Sales & Marketing, CBS MarketWatch, Stephen Moss, General Manager for Advertising & Sales, MSN, Narenda Rocherolle, CEO, Webshots and Lorraine Ross, Vice President, Sales, USA Today.com.

Michael started with a presentation with lots of stats (right-click here to download the presentation). The nut was this: business is great for publishers these days. Everything is up. “Audience, sell out rates and CPMs are all growing, in that order,” he said. He noted that the IAB just announced Q1 results for the industry, which found that, “Internet advertising totaled nearly $2.3 billion in the first quarter of 2004 - the highest quarterly total on record since PwC and IAB began tracking revenues in 1996. This quarter also marks a 38.9% increase over Q1 2003 ($1.6 billion) and a 3.9% increase over Q4 2003 ($2.2 billion).”

Asked what pain keeps them awake at night, the one consistent chorus all panelists echoed was “inventory management.” As behavioral targeting takes off, and publishers are actually selling their inventory (instead of just hyping the concept), trying to make sure publishers have enough inventory to sell in all segments is a huge headache. Remarkably, no vendor yet has a solution for this problem, meaning publishers are having to kludge solutions in-house. Major opportunity for the first vendor to get an inventory yield management system to market.

Other highlights of the panel:

Publishers Are Trying To Annoy Users Less

The New Technologies for Web Publishers panel thoroughly covered the world of rich media advertising (do people still call it that?) from the publishers’ perspective, starting with a comprehensive technology review and leading into an insightful discussion among executives of Yahoo!, CNET and New York Times Digital.

One lesson learned: Don’t try to get your client’s crappy creative onto nytimes.com. Lincoln Millstein, EVP at the Times, told of a creative approval process in which 60 percent of submitted ads are rejected and decisions have been known to escalate to the publisher’s office. Oy!

Adrian D’Souza from CNET and Hunter Madsen from Yahoo! both described very thorough and logical approaches to ad serving technologies, evaluating new offerings based on advertiser demand (as opposed to vendor demand, which tends to be insatiable), thorough technical testing and a judgment about the sophistication and strength of the company behind the offering. Hunter mentioned a browser testing threshold of 80 percent of viewers seeing non-default ads.

The tenor of the discussion was very positive, with all panelists indicating growing success in operationally handling creative, as well as minimizing user annoyance. The sense was that publishers could force advertising quality to improve with increasing sell-through rates. This, in turn, should lower annoyance complaints as creative becomes more interesting and compelling. Hunter, in particular, pointed out that Yahoo! had moved beyond the basic IAB guidelines for rich media and has begun looking at how the hovers and expanding banners interfere with navigation elements on the site, with an eye to minimizing the time ads cover up key areas.

Responding to an audience question, both Lincoln and Hunter acknowledged using unprompted audio on certain sections of their sites, such as Movies and Automotive. The big next step, everyone agreed, was video, with quality and speed as the key barriers to publisher adoption.