Online Marketing Blog from Radical

Set in the heart of Silicon Valley, Search Engine Strategies San Jose is the largest search marketing event in the world. The great and the good of search marketing - advertisers, agencies, technologists and the search engines themselves - come to sell their wares and to discover the secrets of search. About 10,000 people attended the conference and expo over 4 days, August 7th to August 10th 2006.

Your correspondent delivered a presentation on the subject of Search Marketing for Regulated Industries. This was based on Interactive Return’s experince working with brands sunch as Smirnoff, Guinness and Baileys for Diageo. Other presentations in this session covered search marketing for the pharmaceutical and online retailing sectors.

The highlight of the event was an interview with Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, conducted by search guru Danny Sullivan. The background to this was a recent announcemnet that Google now has 60% of the search market in the US and has just signed a partnership with MySpace to provide search capability to MySpace’s millions of users and in return receive advertising space for Google’s Adwords.

Schmidt was keen to promote Google’s support for individual privacy. AOL’s recent snafu whereby they released the search records of thousands of individuals has highlighted the need for privacy protection. Google’s over-arching philosophy to “do no evil” was reiterated but the destruction of clickstream records after an acceptable period was ruled out for now.

An interesting development in the pipeline, according to Schmidt, is that advertisers will be able to select the online publications in the Google Adsense network in which their ads will appear. And it is claimed that the click and conversion rates on ads appearing in the adsense network will become more measurable.

A theme throughout the conference was the need for greater transparency from all the engines, most particularly in regard to click fraud. Schmidt made no promises in this regard saying that the need to retain commercially sensitive information and the fact that it is a “moving target” meant that further information could not be supplied at this time.

Again, somewhat controversially, Google will continue to publish snippets from books that should enjoy the protection of trademark and copyright laws. Google’s lawyers claim that publication in Google is “fair use”.

To finish up Schmidt took some questions from the floor but didn’t give away any trade secrets.

Martin Murray

CEO, Interactive Return

SESSJ2006

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