An ad:tech panel discussed search as a navigational tool, social search and the affects of offline advertising on search.
"Sponsored content has not let up," Dana Todd said. "It's growing and growing and growing."
Said John Battelle: "Generally, the funding levels have gone down quite a bit since the last go round (except YouTube). Search is a user interface now. It's a platform. As a matter of fact, all this activity reminds me of when I was covering the rise of Windows in the late 1980s." At that time, many companies were creating utilities that worked on top of Windows. Today, companies are creating utilities that rest on top of search, including Battelle's own Federated Media. "The odds are that most of us will get wiped out, but the result may be that search, the interface, gets better."
Battelle also suggested that keywords form a "natural language interface for search," and that eventually, "we will stop thinking about search as a box and will start thinking about it as a navigational tool."
But Dana Todd disagreed because, in her experience, users are lazy. "If users have the [Google] toolbar installed, they are way too lazy even to use the URL search anymore."
In Fredrick Marckini's view, for specialty search "the opportunity is to slice off" one part of Google's market at a time, to which "Google's answer is to launch competitors."
"VC money is flowing like it's 1999," Kevin Ryan observed, noting that most venture capital follows an "audience of one motif." But, Ryan continued, "If there's going to be a Google killer, it will be the investments in the technology structure." All communications roads are leading to one converged screen, and Ryan is carefully watching as the telcos upgrade their equipment. "The end result will be how do we interface, and how do we roll all this up into a natural language communications platform?"
Bambi Francisco returned the discussion to whether or not users are lazy, noting that 57 percent of teenagers are mashing up online content. "Yes, people are lazy, but these people are being conditioned to be content creators."
John Battelle replied that, "Search has put intent in front of content… Advertising will always find that strong passionate users drive highly conversant communities. You can't measure that all the time, nor should you. You should be in the conversation." Google has been skillful at intent, but not as good at content. In contrast, "Yahoo has been really good at content, and bought its way into intent" with its Overture acquisition.
Yahoo has been trying to integrate its listings, Bambi Francisco observed, "yet it hasn't helped them with their search ranking."
"There's a lot of work left to be done there," Battelle added.
However, "you can just do a network buy and allow them to do the segmenting," Dana Todd observed, which can be useful because, "the complexities of media planning now in the interactive space are just mind boggling." And the mechanisms for planning are not arriving in the interactive space as quickly as the opportunities for new kinds of advertising are proliferating. "I just have a feeling in the middle of the night that my network buys are wasteful," Todd said.
The conversation then turned to social search, where companies like PreFound and Rollyo are trying to help consumers cut through search clutter. "What do you think about social search," Bambi Francisco asked, "and will the big engines integrate it?"
Kevin Ryan replied: "What we're trying to do here is get away from the basic PageRank methodology" that relies on indexing and spiders. "It's a move forward, a move away from PageRank. Any new technology connecting the user with the information they seek is a step forward, but I don't think it's the end all and be all."
Fredrick Marckini referred to Jim Taylor and Watts Walker's 1998 book, "The 500 Year Delta," suggesting that social search has a similar function to the guides that Taylor and Watts suggested will become commonplace. The intelligentsia and other guides -- also known as influencers -- are "the arbiters of the message… People already treat Yahoo and Google as guides," Marckini continued. "It's a two-step dance: people start with Google and Yahoo, and get to the guides [other, more specialized sites and search engines] from there."
Bambi Francisco then asked if offline promotion can increase online results.
"Without telling us, without warning us," Fredrick Marckini said, one of iProspect's clients began, "an offline campaign that lifted the search campaign" significantly. And this has happened again and again. "The only way to break through a paid search campaign plateau is with offline advertising."
Marckini then cited research that "in consumer electronics and computers, of everybody who did a search and later made a purchase, 92 percent of people bought offline." The converse, however, is more interesting to Marckini: Only eight percent made the search online. As ecommerce and brick-and-mortar companies cease to be separate, "the opportunity is for people with physical stores to do online advertising" and see what happens.
Kevin Ryan noted that a recently updated round of that research showed that the number had shifted down to 86 percent of people buying offline. "Miraculous things can happen when you stop focusing on your initial keyword list and start focusing on your brand," Ryan said.
Ryan went on to talk about how the Honda Element search campaign won a Yahoo Search Light award for its unique use of search. Buying inexpensive keywords like "Possum Pooh," the RPA campaign got tremendous results by capitalizing on the campaign's use of animals. "It was a good case study in how to think beyond the product set," Ryan said.
John Battelle then asked, "Do people change creative based on possum pooh…? That would close the loop."
Bambi Francisco concluded the session by asking each panelist for a closing thought on the future of search.
John Battelle replied, "I really don't think we've seen yet anything that looks like what search will look like in 10 years."
Fredrick Marckini predicts that search "behavior will move offline, to TiVo, cell phones," and other appliances.
Kevin Ryan said that "we should look to the self-programming models, self programming with content," all of which, "will roll up into the user of one model."
Dana Todd had the final word, suggesting that as clutter increasingly turns users off, they'll look elsewhere. As search penetrates everything, "we're not going to buy it the same way; we're not going to use it the same way… I don't even think we'll be using the term 'search marketing' in 10 years."
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