NextStage Evolution's founder compares searching for ads on TV, radio, print and online-- and finds that only online offers the ad-information hybrid, where finding what you're looking for becomes, magically, a piece of cake.

I'd like you to partake in a little experiment with me. I'd like you to go sit in front of your TV, turn it on, and find a commercial on Derek Tangye. Okay. I'll make it easier; find a commercial on Kurzweil keyboards. How about day trips in New England?

As I write this, ski season is starting in northern New England. My guess is that, if you had any luck at all, it was for the day trips.

Let's repeat the experiment, this time with your radio. Spin the dial (God, am I old!) until you find an ad for Per Olov Enquist. How about Cape Breton Master Fiddle Maker Clayton Carmichael. How about coffee makers?

For those with an interest, I'm having my morning cup of coffee in our dining room, writing this long hand into my notebook while looking into both our library and music rooms, hence the literary and musical themes.

Do you have a newspaper handy? Maybe a print magazine? See if you can find any of the above in there.

Last part of the experiment-- now find these things on the web.

My God, it's magic! No problem finding the information you wanted, right? There's an important reason for the problem disappearing on the web, and it had nothing to do with TV or radio or print. It had nothing to do with going from offline to online media. The magic was in moving from an "ad" to "information."

The magic in action
I'm old enough to remember when there were no ads on internet sites. I'm old enough to think there's a difference between "internet" sites and "web" sites. However, I'm not old enough -- and there's not a lot of people in this last category -- to remember the shift from "television stations" to "shows" and from "broadcasts" to "programs."

The difference I'm inferring has nothing to do with age and everything to do with the media involved. More than radio and TV but much like newspapers and print media, the internet's roots were and are still in information. Much like radio and TV, web-based advertising didn't take off until there was a critical mass of users out there to make the investment in advertising cost effective. Nobody advertised on radio when there were only twelve receivers in the whole town and people tuned in by moving a needle across a crystal (yep, I remember those). I remember my cousin Paul setting up a radio station in his basement. He had a broadcast range of about 700 feet. Basically he broadcast what Grandma and Grandpa were doing, what my aunts and uncles were up to, which cousins were playing in what school games... He had a very loyal listenership and no ads. He also did more to sell radios to my family than anybody else and never made a dime for all his troubles.

The same thing was true for early TV. Great pictures of nature and people doing their thing, a broadcast range of maybe a mile or two, fuzzy pictures which got better when either I or my sister held the rabbitears a very specific way. No ads, though.

But when enough people had radios, ads appeared, broadcast power and range increased, you could listen to different shows because different shows appealed to different people and different people buy different products. That same thing happened with TV.

The same thing happened in print but it took much, much longer. Print, like the web, has much stronger roots in getting information out to the public. I should also clarify that I consider "print" not just post-Gutenberg. I include tablets from Mt. Horeb and before. That being the case, maybe illuminated manuscripts were the first print ads?

So the magic in moving from offline to online media isn't in finding ads for what you want, it's in getting the information you need to make a decision about what you want. Is there a science behind this? I'm sure there is but it's not an easy one to fathom. As Hans Riemer, president of Market-Vantage LLC told me, "...you're never sure which button it was you pushed that bumped up your search engine rankings. There are hundreds of factors and isolating one is darn near impossible. But every little bit helps."

I think that's all about to change and it's something I'd like to know more about. It seems that some search engines are going to use "predictive searches." This means search engines will attempt to "fill in" your search query for you as you're typing it. I find the whole concept fascinating, although I believe what NextStage means by "predictive" isn't what the market means by "predictive." (Anybody not surprised we're a little different, raise your hand.)

Who owns the magic?
I may not know how to properly ask a question (ie, enter an efficient and exacting query into a search engine), and I'll appreciate any help I can get. Of course, what I want to know first is the price for the help I'm getting. In this case -- and here's my concern -- I've lost the ability to get the information I need to make a decision about what I want. Some company is paying for the right to tell me which questions to ask.

There will be a value on giving me information specifically paid for by whatever company purchases the query string the "predictive" search engine gives me. It was one thing to purchase words and phrases so that a company showed up higher in the search listings. Is it the same, though, to give me those words and phrases when the results are predefined? Talk about a cornered market! Whoosh! There's no more betting involved, folks, and the whole concept of keyword auctions takes on a whole new meaning.

It used to be that I had a good guess that keyword A would return value B and the uncertainty created a speculation market. If I now know for a fact that keyword A is going to return value B, the market is completely redefined and speculation no longer takes part. Whatever company can afford the most desirable search string is the company people entering the search string will find. Anybody ever heard "When I want your opinion I'll give it to you"? Welcome to "I'll answer your question, but first I'm going to tell you what to ask." The 2008 U.S. Presidential elections are coming up and politicians are going to love this.

Joseph Carrabis is CRO and founder of NextStage Evolution and NextStage Global, and founder of KnowledgeNH and NH Business Development Network. He is also author of the Biz Media Science blog. Read full bio.