SMX London Explores Search in 2007

By Martin Murray

CEO, Interactive Return

At the recent SMX London, search insiders discussed developments in Search in 2007 in the “What’s New with Search Advertising” session. The participants were Mel Carson, adCenter Community Manager, Europe MSN, Alexis Sitaropoulos, Head of Marketing, Miva, Richard Gregory, COO Latitude and Richard Firminger, Regional Sales Director, Yahoo! Search Marketing, Northern Europe with the session chaired by Chris Sherman, Executive Editor, SearchEngineLand.com.

Richard Gregory outlined some of the developments in 2007 from the agency perspective.  Yahoo Panama arrived delivering an improved user interface to make campaign management easier, geo-targetting (Editor’s Note: including targeting Ireland-only), Multiple ads for comparative testing and quality index rewards for more qualified ads. Richard expressed the view that “Bid management is dead”. Creative and quality (as defined by the search engines) is now more important. Panama also delivered convergence between Yahoo, MSN and Google in terms of account structure. Across all the major engines 2007 has seen greater transparency being introduced on the content networks. Google’s Placement Report, which details the traffic received from each website in the Content Network, has effected a shift in the online marketers efforts “from the tail of keywords to the tail of distribution”.

Mel Carson presented the results of research conducted recently by MSN in the UK. This showed that there are 2.79M small or medium businesses in the UK with £3Bn invested in websites. 62% of these businesses are not investing in search but 76% of those who do see an immediate increase in sales. Mel points to the existence of three search myths:

Myth 1: 34% of people surveyed believed that it would take a day or more to set up a basic sponsored listings campaign

Myth 2: 56% cite excessive costs as a reason for not including search in their marketing activity

Myth 3: 89% felt that the management of a search advertising campaign was too difficult

Richard Firminger also outlined research from Yahoo! that shows a 90% uplift in offline spending where consumers are exposed to both search and display.

Alexis Sitaropoulos reviewed the Mergers and Acquisitions activity which took place in 2007 including Google’s $3.1Bn offer for Doubleclick, currently being considered by the US Federal Trade Commission and the EU Commission, Yahoo’s acquisition of Right Media, MSN’s $6Bn purchase of aQuantive (holding company for Atlas and Razorfish) and the £56M acquisition of The Search Works by Tradedoubler.

Search and Social Media is of course the topic du jour but Chris Sherman offered an interesting and contrarian view. Chris suggested that social media “feels bubbly” and posed the question, “Does anyone remember Geocities?”. The original social networking site was purchased in 1995 by Yahoo for $5Bn and is now a non-entity. Microsoft’s recent buy-in to Facebook values that enterprise at 500 times its revenue. Presumably, Microsoft knows something now that Yahoo! did not know then.

Richard Gregory looked forward to us all searching using now-ubiquitous GPS devices in the near future and to searching using the TV! (remember those?)