I admit it! 12 years ago I fell into search marketing as a natural addition to the remedial web design I was teaching myself while publishing articles I wrote about The Beatles (Did you know Paul McCartney died?) and Don McLean’s American Pie. The internet captivated my attention with its ability to reach everyone yet I realized that natural search could only do so much (“If you build it…. they will come†only works in the movies). Paid Search presented a reliable way to reach an engaged, enthusiastic audience on a performance basis.
7 years ago, Yahoo! picked up on what I was doing and I relocated to manage advertising opportunities throughout the company. There I added to my experience insight on display advertising, sponsorships, content integration, and comparison shopping and realized the synergy that can be attained online. Upon moving to Hewlett-Packard, I leveraged that insight to manage marketing and search holistically, while still on a performance basis; truly, even brand marketing on a performance basis. The competitive advantage of search (over other forms of advertising), and online in general, is everything is measured and we can translate learning’s and tools from one program to another. Have you considered that, in e-commerce, you should optimize a product datafeed not for Comparison Shopping but because that feed can be used to automate keyword generation, create dynamic sitemaps, or automatically update banner ads? Where else can that be done? Search is beautiful in that it is driven by demand and behavior; people search, our job is to respond to that so as not to miss an opportunity. In responding to that, managing keywords, we have visibility to the largest focus group on the planet, a panel of searchers who, by searching, give us insight to demand, brand consideration, advertising effectiveness, and awareness. One of the brilliant Search engineers at Yahoo! always said, “It’s all about search.†He couldn’t have been more accurate.
I’m the kind of guy that can never sit still so even now I branch out into new mediums with which to learn and benefit from this still emerging industry. What about how MSN’s platform can adjust bids based on regional or demographic performance? That’s something Yahoo! and Google haven’t caught on to yet; a tremendous opportunity for all of us. You could say I live and breathe this business, this blog is the literal result of that.
How about yourself? What brought you online and what keeps you here?
