Category Archives: SEM

Will Canada Get Some Google Respect?

First published September 16, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Just in case our friends to the south haven’t driven it home to us repeatedly, Canada is inconsequential. We’re a rounding error in revenue projections. We’re a few scattered bodies somewhere north of the 49th, a far-flung geographic extension of Montana, Minnesota and other assorted northern states. We’re an inconvenient expanse of land separating the mainland from Alaska, bad news for air commuting but good news for the cruise business. In general, we often get the feeling that life would be easier for the rest of you if we just went away.

A Really Soft Launch

But haven’t you heard? Google is investing in the Canadian market! The company is ramping up its sales team here. Well, you can be forgiven if you haven’t heard, because the news was barely a drop in the PR bucket next to the roar that was the launch of Google Instant.

And that, in a nutshell, is the story of our lives up here in the Great White North. You really don’t care. I remember being in Oklahoma once the morning after the Canadian federal election. Naturally, I was somewhat curious who won. I picked up the copy of USA Today that was dropped outside my hotel room and thumbed through the entire paper to find out who the leader of Canada might be. That, by the way, would be your single largest trading partner, not to mention your primary source of oil, wood, grain and several other essential natural resources. But somehow, the vast editorial resources of USA Today couldn’t be bothered to devote even one column inch to the future of your neighbor to the north.

Canada’s Coming-Out Party

Google has had a sales office in Canada since 2002, but it hasn’t been an easy task selling to Canadians. I myself have gone on record in the past saying Canadian marketers may have a somewhat obtuse view of digital marketing, due to their contorted vantage point. We’re a Canadian company that does 85% of its business with U.S. companies because of this lag in our native marketplace.

But Google apparently believes we’re worth further attention. Maybe it’s because Google’s CFO, Patrick Pichette, is Canadian. He boasts of having a picture of a Tim Horton’s sign on his Nexus One. I haven’t had a chance to connect yet with the Canadian ex-pat, Chris O’Neill, who’s currently in transit from Mountain View to Hogtown (that would be Toronto, for you non-Canucks) to unfurl the Google banner. According to his bio, O’Neill is as Canadian as they come. He grew up working in his parent’s Canadian Tire store, for heaven’s sake. I look forward to having a polite chat and a frosty Molson’s to welcome him home. Perhaps we’ll even strike up a game of street hockey and celebrate with some poutine after. A word of advice though, Chris: Don’t forget your toque — it’s getting a little nippy up here in the evenings.

Full Speed Ahead… Maybe

Seriously though, I suspect Google’s timing might be bang-on. I think Canadian business is ready to get serious about digital. I know Canadian consumers made that decision long ago. And once Canadians get over their natural fear of just about anything involving any degree of risk, they do tend to make up for lost time. When you combine these factors, I suspect the Canadian marketplace is ripe for some serious digital revolution. But, to be on the safe side, maybe we should strike a Royal Commission on the subject and wait two or three years for their report.

In any case, it will be great to have a few more voices preaching the digital gospel in the Canadian wilderness. When you have this much room and this few people, it can get mighty lonely up here.

More Ways B2B Search Marketing Differs from B2C

First published July 1, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Last week, I looked at ways that B2B search marketing is different from search campaigns aimed at consumers. I looked at how risk avoidance was an overriding concern. Also, a B2B purchase is almost always an item on someone’s to-do list, so they have little patience for being “immersed” in experiences or heading down navigational dead ends on a Web site. Today, I’ll look at two other ways that B2B buying behaviors differ from those in the consumer marketplace:

Unfamiliar Territory

In the consumer world, billions of branding dollars are spent to create a sense of familiarity not just with a product but also with a brand. Even if we’ve never bought a product before, there’s a good chance that we have some idea of the competitive landscape within the product category.  If we were looking to make a purchase for ourselves, I would venture to say there are very few things we would consider buying where we wouldn’t even know the name of the product. Yet, this is an everyday occurrence in the B2B world. Often, we’re asked to make informed purchase decisions about products and services that we hadn’t heard of yesterday.

When we strike into unfamiliar territory, we create a challenge for the B2B marketer. If we don’t even know the name of the product we’re looking to buy, how do we start looking for it? Where do we begin? It’s pretty hard to Google something when you don’t know what to call it. This makes keyword discovery one of the most challenging and important parts of any B2B search campaign.

Often B2B purchases are not only a buying decision, but also come with a steep learning curve. Buyers have to identify a potential solution, learn about the product category, identify the potential vendors, and determine decision criteria — all tasks that must be accomplished before buyers even start evaluating their alternatives.  Imagine trying to buy a car or a flat-screen TV if you had no idea what those products were — or even if they existed at all.

Decision by Committee

Sometime ago in my life, as I hung out my advertising consultant shingle, I was introduced to the joys and tribulations of committee-driven decision-making. I uncovered the sad truth behind the joke, “How do you determine the average IQ of committee? You take the lowest IQ in the group and divide it by the number of people in the committee.”

B2B purchases are often driven by committee. And, as we found in the BuyerSphere research, different members of the committee have different agendas. In high-risk, long-cycle purchases, the internal politics involved in a purchase can rival anything you’ll find on Wisteria Lane. These differing agendas mean that signals from committee members can seem to be at cross-purposes, making life exceeding difficult for the vendor.

Here’s the big challenge from a search marketing perspective: If different committee members are looking for different information (as determined by their own objectives) they will also expect distinctly different experiences. Your Web site and search campaign somehow has to be able to offer clear and compelling paths through this tangled knot of prospect behaviors. Clear segmentation options, relevant messaging, and highly intuitive navigation are three ways to guide different buyers with different objectives to the right destination.

B2B is different from B2C. It’s more complex, more challenging — and, in my opinion, much more interesting.

How B2B Search Marketing Differs from B2C

First published June 24, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

As I write this, I’m at the B2B Search Strategy Summit in San Francisco. Mary O’Brien, the summit organizer, told me that many potential attendees — and yes, even some panelists — questioned where B2B search marketing was really all that different from B2C. Shouldn’t the same basic practices apply?

I answer that question the same way I answer all questions about marketing: Let’s look at it through the eyes of the buyer. And when we do that, we find some significant differences as we step from the consumer side to the business side.

It’s All About Risk

When we make decisions in any part of our lives, we have a “brake” and a “gas pedal” that governs the decision-making process. Call it risk and reward, prevention and promotion, loss and gain. Whatever you call it, in most decisions, there are opposing forces, and the ultimate decision depends on the balance between the two. If reward overcomes risk, we buy. If risk rules, we don’t.

On the consumer side of our lives, there’s often a strong emotional investment in the reward part of the equation. For example, I really want a new road bike. I can’t rationalize the purchase, seeing as I have a perfectly good used road bike, but that doesn’t quell the pangs of jealousy I feel when I see someone wheeling down the road on a new Cervelo or Trek Madone. Someday, I know, reward (the joy of saying “look, me too!”) will overcome the risk (parting with a significant chunk of cash) for me.

But think about most B2B purchases. If we’re looking at buying a new rack of servers, or supply chain management software, where’s the fun in that? The only real emotion at play here is the risk of screwing up and being fired. Emotions in B2B purchases are heavily biased towards risk mitigation. And that directly impacts your search strategy. Messaging has to minimize risk in the eyes of the buyer, rather than try to build on the emotional reward side of things. I can’t say the same would be true if you were bidding on terms like “convertible roadster,” “touring motorcycle” or even “iPad.”

It’s Their Job

The second difference is directly related to the first. B2B purchases are part of someone’s job. They’re not doing it because they simply love buying enterprise software or industrial supplies. No one makes a hobby out of buying O-rings or heavy-duty water pumps.

How does this affect a search strategy? It heightens the need for efficient retrieval of information. While a consumer looking at a sports car or booking a cruise might want to get “immersed” in an “experience,” typical B2B purchasing agents want to get in and out, allowing them to put one more check mark beside their ever-growing to-do list. They will not be in a forgiving mood if you send them down dead ends or tie them up in confusing navigation. This is all about making their job easier. And that becomes crucial when you think about landing page strategies and the path that leads from them.

Next week, I’ll cover the other two ways that B2B differs from B2C: the fact that often buyers are in unfamiliar territory, and that B2B purchases are typically group decisions.

Next Week in Captiva: Shaking Things Up, TED-style

First published April 8, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Today you sit there, an audience spread across the digital marketing landscape, scraping together a few precious moments on your daily calendar to read this column. Next week I hope you’ll all be basking in the sunshine of Captiva Island, Fla., your cranium brimming over with tidbits and brain-bombs about search and the industry we toil in. The Google-gods willing and major algorithmic overhauls aside, we can all get away from the daily grind long enough to step back and take a look at where this whole thing might be going.

A Summit Three Years in the Making

I’ve been fortunate to work with MediaPost to help program the Search Insider Summit for the past five shows (I think, the brain’s a little numb at this point). Over time we’ve refined and tweaked to the point where we had a pretty smooth-running operation. This time, however, I decided to change all that. I’ve never been a particularly loyal adherent to the maxim: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. I believe in mixing stuff up on a pretty regular basis. In this case, the catalyst for change was a chance to attend the TEDActive conference this spring.

I loved how TED managed to lodge particularly toothsome concepts in my brain (at a breathlessly unrelenting pace, to be honest) and then throw me loose amongst the TED-sters (yes, it is a little cult-like) to try to digest in my limited downtime.

The resulting conversations were nothing short of amazing. The first day at lunch, I was sharing a picnic basket with five other strangers and eavesdropping on a conversation happening beside me. The topic? The role of mirror neurons in determining the vicarious enjoyment on thrill rides at an amusement park. I didn’t catch names at first, but one speaker owned an amusement part in New Jersey, and the other was a professor of neuroscience at UC Irvine.

This past week, as I was zipping past TV channels, I saw a familiar face. There was my neuroscience prof! He was appearing as himself on the crime drama “Criminal Minds.” He just happens to be one Dr. James Fallon, a world-renowned expert on the psychology and neurology of psychopaths! Now, where else could you just happen on a conversation like that?

The Convergence of Conversations

That was the spirit I wanted to create at Captiva (minus the psychopathic stuff).  Like TED, we have an atmosphere that invites conversations. The informal and intimate atmosphere is conducive to brainstorming. And this time, I wanted to borrow from the TED concept and transition what happens up on stage to be more forward-looking and strategic in nature. I wanted to give more people a chance to share their thoughts, so I borrowed the TED format of a mix of 18-minute and five-minute (TED actually limits to three-minutes) talks. Plus, we retained unique Search Insider traditions like our roundtable break-out sessions.

The challenge I threw at presenters was to crystal-ball the question: Where is search going from here? I divided the question into five parts: the core technology, the user experience, the marketing strategies, the search marketing industry and the data and tools. Then, with the help of our advisory board (Gian Fulgoni – Comscore, John Nicoletti – Google, Stefan Weitz – Microsoft, Chris Copeland – GroupM and Frank Lee – The Search Agency) we created a 3-day agenda from the pitches we received. It’s promising to be a fascinating summit. And for good measure, we’re bringing Ball State University back to re-envision Google through Gen-Next eyes.

It was a little hairy, taking a tried-and-true format and reinventing it, but I think you’ll be pleased with the results. See you soon in Captiva!

Search May Not be Sexy Anymore, But It Pays the Bills

First published August 5, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Is it just me, or is search getting boring? It’s been months since we’ve had a good, ruckus-raising tidbit to get our teeth into. The Bing-Yahoo integration? That’s the best you can do? Yawn.

Is it me…

I suspect that it is, in part anyway, me. To be honest, I haven’t been much of a “Search Insider” lately. In the past few months, precious little of my time has been spent pondering the industry. I’m way behind on industry news and haven’t attended a search conference or event for a few months. My days have been full with the busy-ness of running a business. I’ve had other things on my mind.

My first Search Insider column ran six years ago and since then, I’ve written 276 columns, counting this one.  That’s a little over 220,000 words — most of them at least tangentially relevant to search. Perhaps the well has just run dry.

Or is it search?

But then again, perhaps it’s the industry.  Maybe search just isn’t that sexy anymore. Remember the day when Google was going to change the world? Remember how marketers just couldn’t wrap their heads around this “search” thing? Back then, I could get righteously indignant and bang out a column wondering when the world would “get” how important this it. But now, they’ve got it. It seems silly to proselytize search now that Google has become a verb. Search has come, has conquered, and we’ve all moved on. Again…yawn.

Sure, there are always new search entries in the marketplace, but when’s the last time somebody used the words Google Killer? Is it because Google is invincible, or is it just that we really don’t care anymore? Even Aaron Goldman, who surely has squatter’s rights on “Google Killer,” hasn’t squeezed it into a column since last May. In the last year, only three Search Insider columns have used the term. When we Insiders stop caring about the world after Google, imagine how disinterested the rest of the population must be.

Search and the Oxygen Cycle

As I watch my family’s day-to-day routines unwind, I realize that search is like air. We use it without thinking about it. We just accept it. And so, the industry that lies behind the query box falls into the same category as the biochemical process that ensures we have oxygen. I don’t care how it works, as long as it does work.

So, maybe search is boring. Maybe it’s lost its luster, ceasing to be a bright shiny object. Maybe the cool people have all moved on to social media and mobile, where they attend conferences wearing block logoed T-shirts, sipping free mimosas and talking about how no one gets Foursquare. It’s the same group you used to see at the search shows, waiting to board the bus to the Google Dance.

But I can’t help thinking that perhaps this is a good thing. You can only be cool for so long. Sooner or later, you have to grow up and do some real business. It’s the difference between a bar pick-up and a marriage. Social might be sexy, but search pays the bills and puts food on the table.

On second thought, maybe a little diversion is just what the doctor ordered. Look over here, all you journalists and financial analysts! Look at what’s happening where the really cool people play. Ooh and aah at these social widgets and nifty apps. Meanwhile, we search people will drudge along, cranking out a few more billion in search revenues.

A Farewell to SEMPO

Today, the election for the new board of SEMPO is open. It’s a little bitter sweet for me. For the first time in 7 years, you won’t find my name on the ballot. I’ll be stepping down from the board and letting new blood take over.

I’ve been privileged to serve on the SEMPO board since 2003. Only Dana Todd and Kevin Lee, both founding members, have put in a longer tour of duty. In that time I’ve served as Chair of SEMPO for two years and have been the Research Chair, along with Kevin, for almost the entire time. I’ve seen SEMPO grow along with the industry to the point today where it has hundreds of members around the world. Not bad for an organization that started with a handful of search marketers meeting after the sessions had ended at an industry conference, looking to create a shared voice and gain a little more respect. I would say – mission accomplished!

But there is still so much more to do! I’ve had the opportunity to help the current executive start to define what SEMPO’s role could be in the future. The challenge, as it is with anything involving search, is trying to define the scope of what constitutes our reach. Search in the last decade has morphed and seeped into every aspect of our lives. Defining the role of an organization that tries to wrap it’s arms around that has been an ongoing challenge. And this is a challenge that isn’t going to get any easier.

SEMPO has never had a dearth of aspiration. We have dreamed big! We have consistently punched above our weight. We have ridden over rough patches of controversy and dissension. SEM’s are an outspoken lot. Most have us have heard first hand the uproar that ensues when you get a bunch of search marketers in the same room. Imagine, then, the challenge of trying to be the global voice for those loud, passionate, stubborn and thoroughly glorious marketers. Passion has infused SEMPO from day one, from the drive of Barbara Coll to the amazing and ongoing dedication of SEMPO leaders including Dana Todd, Kevin Lee, Jeff Pruitt, Massimo Burgio, Chris Boggs, Bill Hunt, Sara Houlobek and many others. I have been privileged and humbled to serve on the board with all of them. They will always be my mentors and friends. We have been on an amazing journey.

This is not the place for a list of the accomplishments of SEMPO. This is just a place for me to say thank you for the opportunity. And in offering thank yous, I would be remiss if I did not include some of SEMPO’s amazing administrative support team at Virtual, Inc, especially Amanda Pierce, Paula Hunter and a man I hope I can always call friend, Andy Freed. There are others, but those are the ones that I have spent the most time with.

In an industry that’s a fractious and quick to criticize as this one is, it’s always easy to point blame. It’s much harder to stop bitching long enough to dig in and and do something about it. I can tell you from experience, SEMPO boards have always had the interest of the industry firmly at the core of what they do. Not one member I have ever served with has been in it for their own glorification or interests. Not one. Because after 7 years on the board, I can tell you there are much easier ways to grab the spotlight than to serve on SEMPO’s board. The amount of dedication and commitment required is substantial, and, at the executive level, nothing short of monumental. We, each one of us, love this industry and are here to push it forward. We have struggled with the best way to do that, given that our dreams are consistently much bigger than our resources, but our motivations have never been in question.

I have my own goals and plans for the coming few years and knew it was time to step down, both for my sake and for the sake of the organization. As tough as it is for me to personally turn this corner, I know it’s the right path to take. When you cast your vote, I ask you to do so with careful consideration. We need a strong and healthy SEMPO, because the organization has provided a respected voice for this industry. Search marketing now has a global footprint and that voice has to continue to be heard. It has to be heard from Beijing and Oslo, from Milan and Buenos Aires, from Osaka and Sydney. And it has to be heard from Phoenix, Denver, Chicago, San Francisco, New York, Toronto, Vancouver and Seattle

I like the saying Farewell, as it really embodies my wish for SEMPO. Fare well in the future. Continue to Dream and Do. Continue to be passionate. Continue to talk, connect and be heard.

I’ll miss you.

A Look at What Might Have Been

First published December 17, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I’ve stated before in this column that “It’s a Wonderful Life” is perhaps my favorite holiday movie.  Yesterday, as I was having lunch, I had my own George Bailey moment. I had a chance to see what my life might have been like had I not made the decision to go into search 14 years ago.  I was thumbing through the local newspaper (yes, I still do that on occasion) and the lead story in the business section caught my eye. The title was: “Ad Agencies adjusting to the new economy.”

Kelowna, B.C.  is a small town (although larger than Bedford Falls). It supports three full-service ad agencies. I know the founders of each of them fairly well. A long time ago, in another life, I was one of these agencies, working with a handful of clients, many of which were in real estate.  In 1996, frustrated with the challenges of dealing with small-town budgets and attitudes, I decided to move into the online space, which subsequently took me into the world of search. That allowed me to work with clients outside my market.

I guess, given what’s happened to these three agencies, my decision to move online proved to be the right one. In the last year, one agency has gone from 12 full-time people to just the founder, who has become an independent consultant. Two of the agencies saw a split between two long-term partners and a drastic reduction both in clients and staff.

These are the facts. One can read between the line to get a glimpse of the heartache and soul-searching that came with these very difficult business decisions. At least two of the agency founders said they were going through a personal discovery journey and were looking at pursuing other “more rewarding” professional endeavors in the future. Not to be overly cynical, but I find the frequency of these voyages of “self discovery” are usually inversely related to the success of your business. With a few notable exceptions, not many people reevaluate their professional lives when their businesses are rocking.

Suddenly, Search Seems Rosy

2009 wasn’t a banner year for my company, but compared to these stories, it was a skip down the Yellow Brick Road. We grew top-line revenues by 14%, added nine new jobs, opened a new sales office, maintained or increased client satisfaction levels, gave our employees healthy pay raises and managed to stay on the right side of the ledger sheet.

I paint these contrasts not so much to say how great we are in search, but because they present a microcosmic view of the shift in marketing. While traditional budgets were being ruthlessly slashed throughout 2009, digital and search budgets bounced along and managed to keep from being swamped by the economic storm. I certainly have talked to several search marketers who had a tough year (some of whom are also looking at their own personal “voyages of discovery”) but I would guess that the incidence rate is far less than you would find on the other side of the digital divide.

All Aboard!

The other interesting thing I gleaned from the story in my local newspaper is that all of the agency founders are paying more attention to what’s happening in the digital domain. As the demand for real estate brochures and print ads dries up, they’re only now realizing that something surprisingly robust and healthy appears to be happening online.  Suddenly, strategies including Facebook and Twitter are starting to show up in their pitches to local clients.

Having made my decision to move online almost a decade and a half ago, I would caution these people that becoming a digital “guru” may not be quite as easy as it appears to be. As became abundantly clear at the Search Insider Summit a few weeks ago, we’ve still got a long way to go before we understand the various online gears and levers of a truly integrated campaign. You’re more than welcome to jump on the digital bandwagon, but be prepared — it’s moving a lot faster than you might think!

What I Took Away from the Search Insider Summit

First published December 10, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I’ve had a few days now to reflect on what came out of the Search Insider Summit in Park City. It was an interesting perspective: Avinash Kaushik telling us that the majority of search marketing “sucks”; Mark Mahaney prophesizing that search is poised for a big climb in 2010; Rob Griffin warning us the entire industry is going through the throes of change; Chris Copeland showing us that social media is inextricably linked with search activity; and Mike Moran cautioning us that CEOs and CFOs worship at one altar and one altar only: profit. If we want to sell search, we have to speak that language.

Adding to this, I climbed on my usual soapbox, arguing that we spend too much time with data and too little time with our customers. In the panel exploring how to balance qualitative and quantitative approaches, the panelists were asked how they differentiated the two. For me, the answer is this: Quantitative is watching the dashboard while you drive. Qualitative is looking out the windshield.

SEM’s Call to Arms

So, when you mash this up over 3 days and distill the essence, what do you end up with? I think SEMs heard a distinct call to “up their game” last week in Park City. Sure, there are tough problems to tackle. Marketers are demanding more from their budgets than ever before. As Avinash said, attribution causes many marketers to “cry like little girls.” Determining user intent and matching it in our ads is tough. Matching it on the landing page and beyond is even tougher. Trying to wrap our heads around the shifting tide of social media gives us all a migraine. And if our jobs weren’t tough enough, Google just gave SEO a slap upside the head last week with personalization of all search results. Thank God the bar was open after the sessions wrapped up.

But we search marketers are a resilient bunch. The people roaming the hallways of the Chateaux at Silver Lake didn’t look morose. In fact, they were almost giddily optimistic. There was a sense that as rough as the ride was in this boat we all chose to set sail in, at least it was heading in the right direction. Rob Griffin put it this way: “If you’re any good, you might not have the same job title or be doing the same thing in a few years, but you’ll be employed. That’s more than a lot of other people will be able to say.”

I’m Not Sure Where We’re Going, but Follow Me!

I look at it this way. The market has already shifted. And where the market goes, we marketers have to follow. Somebody has to figure this stuff out. And, as I remarked to someone over drinks after the sessions wound down, I’m constantly amazed by the number of people in marketing who have impressive titles on their business cards but simply don’t get the magnitude of the behavioral shift we’re in the middle of. Avinash is right. A lot of what I see in the digital marketing landscape “sucks.” We have to get better. We have to get smarter. We have to do a better job of listening to the people we’re trying to market to.

I know we will get better. Really, do we have a choice? And the advantage search marketers have is that we have chosen to work in the one area of online that has been an unqualified success. Everyone is looking to us as an example of digital marketing done right. And we’re looking at each other saying, “Okay, that worked. Now, what’s next?”

Wrenching Changes in Ad Revenue Models

This week, I’ve talked about the importance of information foraging in understanding online behaviors and our interactions with content, the fact that we don’t really think our way through online interactions, but rather navigate through instinct and habit, and yesterday, how different intents lead to different levels of engagement with ads. All of this has been to show how Rupert Murdoch and other publishers are seriously off base in trying to put walls around their content to protect their obsolete business models.

The Planting of Intent

But, as comScore Chair Gian Fulgoni commented on yesterday’s post, does all this mean that display ads have no value? Yes, we agree, ads aligned with intent, such as search and relevant text ads, are the ideal, but something needs to plant that intent in the first place. Something needs to create awareness, which sparks need and kicks the brain into gear to go seek information. In Gian’s words:

there’s another issue that needs to be addressed: not all consumers search for information via an online search query. They’re just not all that rational. As a result, using display ads can get an advertiser a far higher reach against the target audience. And that higher reach can cause the total sales lift from a display campaign to rival that from search – even if the sales lift among those exposed is higher in the case of search.

There’s also another even more important point that we need to consider: brand building. That needs to occur even when the consumer isn’t foraging for information in support of an impending buying decision. Otherwise the value of an individual brand name isn’t going to be as meaningful to the consumer when he / she is in the shopping / buying mode. CPG manufacturers know this well. Every week, their special prices (“temporary price reductions”) are shown in the local newspaper feature ads. Placed by the retailer but funded by the manufacturer. The consumer can pick and choose the products they intend to buy and where they will buy them (and, incidentally, store loyalty is not the norm). This information – delivered by old media still, but, I would argue, aligned with consumers intent to shop and buy – determines, to a great extent, the store at which a consumer shops and the brands they buy in a particular week. But the important point is that the CPG manufacturers don’t just leave it with running these types of feature ads. They understand that they need to be supplemented with “branding” advertising that they run themselves because they need to make sure that their brand value has been firmly established in the mind of consumers before they compare prices across brands at the shopping / buying stage. This type of branding advertising is delivered via TV, print and radio – and increasingly today, via the Internet. It’s a critical part of brand marketing, and I think it should remain that way even in today’s Internet world, because — as one of our clients recently said to me — “God forbid that price becomes the only determinant of consumers’ brand choice!”

I voiced similar opinions in a previous post, No Search is an Island. Search itself has a naturally limited inventory. If no one is searching for a term, there is no inventory to buy. This lack of scale and reach has been the single biggest limiting factor in search marketing. If you suddenly cut out all awareness advertising, you’ll eventually find your available search inventory dwindling in lock step. Gian’s points are well taken, and indeed, one of the biggest questions for me is how much residual branding value is derived from an ad that is noticed but not clicked. As I said yesterday, I think it depends on how pressing the user’s intent is. If they’re browsing content, my suspicion is that the residual value would be higher than if they’re on a focused information finding mission.

Differing Shades of Gray

As is most transitions, the truth is there there is no absolute answer here. One is neither right or wrong, black or white. What is happening is a shift from one type of behavior to another. The answer is gray, and each day, that shade of gray is gradually shifting more from black to white. Murdoch won’t suddenly find his revenue model shutting off one day. But what will happen (and there are dozens of newspaper bankruptcies to support my case) is that the revenue model will gradually erode. In fact, it has been happening for some time. As we switch our behaviors from a destination information economy to a just-in-time information economy we’ll spend less time casually browsing content and more time taking brief forays through search to find specific pieces of information. And when we do so, all the challenges in ad engagement I addressed yesterday will have to be dealt with. Murdoch’s revenue model won’t shut off tomorrow, but it will gradually melt away to the point where it’s unable to support the business. That is why there’s more than a hint of desperation in his rantings. He knows the ship is sinking and he’s lashing out at what he thinks the cause is: Google. Unfortunately, he’s lashing out at the wrong cause. The real cause is his reader’s changing behaviour.

Brand Building = Fence Painting?

The other point I would make about brand building is this: Gian is right, we need some way to build brands in public consciousness. But even the options for building brand are rapidly shifting. It used to be that mass media was the most efficient choice. It offered reach and frequency. It was scalable and could be measured in GRPs. The market was treated like a fence to be painted. What was the most efficient way to apply as much paint to as much area as possible? The answer, the biggest possible spray gun. It was a pretty simple equation: Area of fence X density of paint = complete saturation. The spray gun didn’t even need to be that efficient at painting, we just had to keep pouring in more paint. Which was fine, as long as the fence was all in one place. But now, the fence is scattered over an impossibly large area. There are fragments spread everywhere. Suddenly, the spray gun isn’t working so well anymore. We need a new approach to brand building, and we’re beginning to explore new techniques, such as tapping into social networks and word-of-mouth. It seems in today’s world, Tom Sawyer had it right..the best way to paint a fence is to enlist an army of recruits to do it for you.

You Can’t Put a Wall Around News

The challenge advertisers face now is trying to find a way to reach an increasingly fragmented market who is spending less time with traditional media and are increasingly seeking information in bite-sized pieces, rather than sitting down to a full meal. And that’s a challenge that traditional media, represented by Rupert Murdoch, seem unable and unwilling to face. Their answer seems to be to rant, rave and hope the whole mess will go away. If people are increasingly seeking information through Google and not looking at my ads, fine, I’ll just lock out Google and lock in my audience by forcing them to pay. Murdoch is skiing down the wrong side of the adoption curve. And, as Danny Sullivan pointed out in his Search Engine Land post, you can no longer put a fence around information and keep it proprietary, especially in the news industry. Breaking stories will break in hundreds of ways online – through Twitter, networks, blogs and news aggregators. Even if the Wall Street Journal breaks a new story, they can’t control it. People don’t care about the source anymore, all they care about is the information. Even if Google is locked out of Murdoch’s content, it will find it somewhere else and will index it. And people will go where ever Google lets them go. For this reason, I disagree with Danny about the viability of a mutually exclusive relationship. Google doesn’t need the Wall Street Journal, but I do believe that the Wall Street Journal needs Google.

So what about the deal with Bing? Is that the answer to Murdoch’s woes? After all, you still get search visitors and you control your content. Again, for all the reasons I’ve stated over the past week, I don’t think this is any answer at all. It may look good on paper to two companies that are entrenched in command and control thinking, but it doesn’t reflect the real world at all. And if Murdoch would take a few minutes to glance at the latest search market share numbers, even he might see why it doesn’t make sense to kick the elephant out of bed to make way for the mouse (okay..perhaps a small dog).

In the final analysis, we have people changing their information consumption habits, which is giving advertising a wrenching kick right in its revenue model. The dramatic success of search was indicative of the power and speed of this behavioral change. The successful model of the future will understand and embrace the reality of information foraging and will leverage the changing habits of people. The search part, aligning with consumers when intent is present, is the easy part to work out. The challenging bit will be to swim upstream and figure out the pieces that have to be in place to spark intent and put the mental train in motion. My suspicion is that mass solutions will no longer work. We’ll have to figure out how to brand build one prospect at a time, one relationship at a time. None of this is good news for traditional publishers, but hey, if everyone won in evolution, the world would be a much more crowded place.

Aligned Intent: A Different Ad Engagement Metric

On Tuesday, I talked about the importance of information foraging in understanding our online behaviors. Yesterday, I talked about how we navigate online based on habit and instinct, keeping our thinking to a minimum. Both of those behaviors are threatening  traditional ad revenue models. The very nature of engagement with advertising is undergoing a dramatic shift. Today, I want to talk more about that shift, because at Enquiro, we’ve seen dramatic evidence of it in our research over the past few years.

The Traditional Model

Let’s begin by exploring how advertising has worked up to now – the model that Rupert Murdoch is still pinning all his hopes on.

In the past, we used a “destination” based information gathering strategy. We depended on someone to gather the information and get it to us at a destination that would become a mental landmark for us. This was the model that gave rise to our traditional news industry. We trusted our favored sources to cover the world for us. It was their job to stay on top of what was happening, interpret it and present it back to us. Publishers developed editorial voices and we grew to trust those voices. We didn’t have time to cover every possible news channel, so we short listed it down to the information sources that best matched our interests and personality. We picked our favourites and trusted these few sources to keep us informed. These favorites formed the most visited locations in our mental information “landscape”.

Once we had our list of a handful of information sources, we would set some time aside every day to stay informed. It was a different paradigm of information gathering. We treated our sources as destinations and made the trip worthwhile by investing some time in it. We’re read the paper in the morning. We’d watch the news at night. We’d listen to news radio. In each of these cases, we’d take a discrete and substantial chunk of our available time and devote it to “staying informed”. There was no specific piece of information we were looking for. We trusted our information sources to serve us something interesting. Our intent wasn’t tied to any particular topic, although there might be sections that we favored (sports or business). Our intent was simply to spend some time with our favorite information source. Just like a trip to a physical destination, we understood that this journey would take some time.

This relationship, that of a favored source, then offered the published a willing set of eyeballs without any set agenda. The audience was there to browse through the content offered. That was the objective. And that objective allowed publishers, and through them, advertisers, to make some safe assumptions: the audience would be there for awhile, the audience had no other urgent priorities, and the audience could be safely categorized by the characteristics of the ideal audience of the channel. One could assume that the reason they favoured the channel was that they matched the target profile. All of this formed the foundation of traditional advertising as we know it.

The publishers job was to amass the audience. By doing so, they could then go to advertisers and deliver the audience. And it was the advertiser’s job to catch the audience’s attention. Again, remember, the audience had already set a significant chunk of time aside to spend with the publisher and the audience had no specific intent other than visiting their information “destination.” This mindset is critical to understand, because it forms the “before” state of the shift I’ll be exploring. The audience had to be distracted by the advertising, but the distraction was a minor derailing of our attention. Let’s dive a little deeper here.

Yesterday, I talked about the switching on and off our our neural autopilots as we do any mental task. Our attention and the full power of our brains only get focused when we need to. The rest of the time, we’re subconsciously scanning to see if there’s anything that merits our attention. The arousal of intent, the mental embedding of a clear objective, kicks the brain into high gear and causes us to focus our attention, including the full power of the frontal lobes – what we can consider the turbocharger of the brain. With those mental mechanics understood, let’s look at how we might browse a newspaper.

Newspapers, or any traditional information source, look the way they do because over years of trial and error, publishers and advertisers have discovered what it takes to catch a few fleeting seconds of a brain’s attention while it’s idling on autopilot. As we pick up the paper, there is no intent which has aroused the full power of the brain. It’s doing what it should be doing, idling as the eyes scan the headlines, graphics and other information cues, looking for something of interest that merits the brain kicking into a higher degree of engagement. What catches our eye depends totally on what we’re interested in. With no set mental agenda, when we look at a newspaper, a story on major crime, a business report on a company we know, a box score for a team we’re a fan of or an ad for a car we’ve been considering all stand a good chance of dragging our eye balls to them and jolting our brain from it’s semi-slumber. The typical display ad (at least, the effective ones) have been honed by years of experimentation to be very good at this. Their entire purpose is to stop the eyeball just long enough for a fragment of the message to sink into the brain.

The Just In Time Information Economy

Now, let’s look at what’s shifted. Through the ubiquity of information online and the reasonable effectiveness of web search in making that information instantly available, we’ve changed the way we gather information. We’ve moved from a “destination” to a “just in time” information economy. Let me return to our food foraging analogy for just a second to illustrate this.

When you shop for groceries, you probably have a favoured store. You trust this store because they have a good selection, the produce is fresh, the deli counter has your favourite cheese, the prices are reasonable, the location is convenient and the staff is courteous. This store becomes your primary food destination, just as a newspaper could become your primary information destination. For certain items, prices may be a little cheaper elsewhere, the produce might be a little better at an organic whole food store and the deli counter may be amazing at a little store you know across town, but it’s just too much trouble to go to all these destinations. You compromise and stick with your store, giving it your loyalty.

But let’s imagine that you could build a pick up window right into your kitchen. Through this pick up window, you could order any food item and it would instantly be delivered to you from any store in the world, right when you need it. No travel was necessary. The idea of a destination suddenly becomes obsolete. Food comes to you, just in time. What would this do to your foraging strategies? How often would you visit your favourite store? Perhaps there would be occasions when an item from your store was offered by your magic “food window”, and you might order it. You might even feel twinges of old loyalties. But the nature of the relationship has forever changed. You’ve become store “agnostic”. Now all you care about are the food items you order. And your intent has also changed. Previously, you went on a “shopping trip” for an hour to a store to pick up a list full of items. Your intent was focused on the store, not an individual item. But with your magic window, if you’re making a recipe and suddenly find you’re out of shallots, your intent is focused on the item you need, not the store you get it from. All you care about is getting the best shallots at the best price. It’s an important mental shift.

That’s what search has done for information. We care much less about the source of the information and more about the nature of the information itself. Also, we have shifted our intent away from the source of the information and to the quality and relevancy of the information itself. This has a profound effect on the nature of engagement with advertising that may sit alongside that information.

The Alignment of Intent

The Just in Time Information Economy has implanted intent in the minds of online users now, dramatically raising the attention threshold that must be bridged by advertising. Think of our mental process as a train. If the train is idling through a rail yard with no particular destination, it’s not that difficult for a hitchhiker (which is what most advertising is, messages interrupting you just long enough to hop on your brain for the ride) to jump on board. But if the train is going full speed towards a destination, the hitchhiker had better be a very fast runner. The Just In Time information economy has meant that many more visitors to online information sites are speeding express trains with a firm destination in mind, rather than than idling in a rail yard. We visit sites because we’ve come through a search engine looking for specific information. The site that hosts that information is secondary to our intent.

In the past few years we’ve done a number of studies of engagement with advertising that have yielded some surprising findings:

  • When it comes to ad awareness (participants remembering seeing an ad on a site) display and video perform best, search and text ads perform worst.
  • When it comes to brand recall (participants remembering the brand featured in the ad) display and video still perform better than search and text, although the gap is dramatically less.
  • When it comes to click throughs, search performs best, followed by text, display and video
  • When it comes to purchase intent, search and text are substantially better than display and video.

Ads that are relevant to the information they sit beside (as in Google’s AdSense network) also have this strange inverse relationship:

  • For ad awareness, non contextually relevant ads performed better than contextually relevant ones
  • For brand recall, it was close to even, with contextually relevant ads having a slight edge
  • For click throughs, contextually relevant ads blew the doors off non contextually relevant ones
  • For purchase intent, again, contextually relevant ads were the clear winner.

Why Ad Awareness Does Not Equal Ad Effectiveness

This is counter intuitive. If an ad is noticed and recognized as an ad, it should have done it’s job, right? According to the old rules, that’s all we ever asked an ad to do. But somehow it seems the rules have changed. Suddenly, ads that often don’t even seem like ads (after all, they’re just a few lines of text) are drastically outperforming more traditional ads where it counts, motivating a prospect to take action. We’ve tested a number of traditional best practices, including more effective creative, increased exposure both through frequency and more channels and this inverse relationship held: search and text outperformed flashing graphics, blaring video and looping audio. What gives?

The answer is the introduction of intent. By having intent planted in the minds of the prospect, by focusing their attention on an objective, the rules of interaction with ads has suddenly changed. When we have intent, we plant a mental objective which narrows our attention and focuses it only on relevant items that get us closer to the objective. Anything not aligned with that intent suffers from “inattentional blindness”. In eye tracking, we see this often has people scan a page, looking directly at an ad for several seconds yet afterwards swear they didn’t see the ad. The most famous example is the video “Gorillas in our Midst.” The unsuspecting are asked to count the number of times the basketball is passed in the video. Once attention is focused, most viewers don’t even notice the man in the gorilla suit walking right through the middle of the teams. If you haven’t seen this, I just spoiled it for you, but you can still try the experiment with your friends.

If a visitor lands on a page with a specific intent, their interactions look much different than those with no intent. They’re laser focused on relevant content. They spend almost no time looking at content that’s not aligned with their intent, including ads. Often, a single glance to identify it as advertising (thus the high ad awareness recall) is the limit of interaction. And the more an ad looks like an ad, the quicker it’s eliminated for consideration. The visitor becomes blind to it.

But if an ad is aligned with intent, it ceases to be an ad. It becomes a relevant information cue, a navigation option, a link laced with information scent. It becomes valuable because it matches our objectives. The user evaluates it along with all the other relevant navigation options on the page. This is exactly what happens with search ads, and the more relevant a text ad on the page, the more likely this is to happen.

Why This Does Not Bode Well for Rupert Murdoch

Murdoch, and for that matter, everyone else who still depends on a revenue from a “Destination” based ad model, will lose in this transition. The ones that will win are those that effectively leverage the alignment of intent and the “Just in Time” Information economy. Tomorrow, I’ll walk through the specifics of why the “Destination” ad model is doomed.