Trends Report: Where Do We Fit In?
by Jay Weintraub
This
week, Search Engine Strategies visited San Jose California.
If you have been to Ad-Tech, this is no Ad-Tech. While there
are many overlapping exhibitors, the feel of the floor is
different. SES reminds me of Grand Central station – airy,
purposeful, controlled. Ad-Tech feels like the floor of the
Stock Exchange – charged, intense, hectic. The suggested
retail price for the Expo floor tells you something is
different. SES you’d only pay $25 whereas Ad-Tech will cost
you $75. You won’t find models at SES, nor will you see so
many people with full conference badges as you do at SES. At
Ad-tech there is almost a smugness that suggests you don’t
need to attend the seminars - again, not so at SES.
All of which leads me to ask, with so much press
and attention focused on search, what does it offer us? Do a
search on Google these days, say you’re looking for online
ed, and you’re bound to find quite a few “aff” included in
the description. For the uninitiated, the “aff” signifies
that the person placing the bid is not the company directly.
It’s an “aff”iliate. When CPA networks follow the money,
they recognize the power of the “aff.”
I didn’t see too many “aff”s walking around the
floor of SES. My guess is that most were still in their home
offices too busy making money. Collectively, they earn a
significant amount of money, but of the whole search pie,
they don’t yet represent enough for companies to offer them
a booth or a seminar to help them grow their business. It’s
too new a trend and still too hard to grasp for it to be in
a mainstream event like SES. Were you a large product-rich
retailer such as Best Buy, this show was meant for you. Here
you are with more content than you can manage and hundreds
of man-hours of work that you must have done to try and cope manually.
At SES, a company like Best Buy must have felt
like a kid in a candy store. On second thought, they
probably felt more like they were taking a stroll down their
own computer isle upon seeing one search engine management
firm after the next. For me, it was like trying to buy
earrings; I couldn’t appreciate the differences between the
different kinds. It must be how some search companies feel
when strolling Ad-Tech and seeing one ad network after the
next.
The technology available for a
company like Best Buy, though, was amazing. Here were
companies that could dynamically scan the content of their
pages, automatically select keywords on which to bid,
and prepare the ads and keywords in a format for uploading.
Along with that, the technology to track the performance by keyword
and compare it to a specified ROI. I can’t decide if I want
to be the guy in charge of their search program, or, if I should
stress about it because I might be out of a job.
The boundaries between the search world and the
untargeted lead acquisition world converge more and more
each day. Inventory that once housed only “our” ads no
longer does. Technology that appeared only available to a
search site no longer is. To some the enlargement of search
and the targeting it offers might seem threatening, but in
the end it really means greater access to high converting
inventory. The “aff”s have already caught on, leading the
way in building that bridge between our side of the world
and search’s. We might not see models at SES, but I look
forward to when the two conferences can take advantage of
the strengths of the other. It might not mean one conference
for both, but it will mean that those with interests in more
than one arena won’t feel confined to picking one over the
other. p;p;
Jay Weintraub
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