PubCon – Special Guest Keynote – Danny Sullivan

It’s interesting – one of the main reasons that a lot of people booked their trips to PubCon was after Danny said he was leaving Incisive and then Brett booked him for a special keynote. So what’s so interesting? Being that it’s the third day of PubCon – the room is significantly more empty then it was for Guy’s keynote on Day 1.

In Brett’s introduction to Danny he talks about how they were supposed to announce the sitemap standard’s at today’s super session but Danny beat him to it in this post last night. Also check it out at www.sitemaps.org

Danny starts that he was up late doing a drug deal with Vanessa Fox from Google. Danny is low-key – I think taking in the vibe of the room. He says he always wanted to come out to PubCon but he never was able to and he’s glad he’s hear.

Webmaster World as an Institution

• Google Dance – he started to think about how much Webmaster World had actually created this vocabulary around it
• GoogleGuy – he’s more famous to us then Larry or Serge
• Florida – that this is a state of mind – even just that WM named these updates
• Canaries – the people who know something is wrong in the SERPs before everyone else
• Unification – bring people together
• Frank Sinatra of search – Brett as a rebel (banning all spiders for example / robots.txt is his blog)

Ten Years On…

This is basically Danny’s tenth year right about search. When he first started he thought “Well maybe this thing has legs” and then it kept growing.

Then again BizWeek said this year that search ad is “slightly below the classified ad” and “slightly above xeroxed ads on telephone poles”.

Is video taking over?

What’s It All Mean?

People ARE spending on search. It’s not some experimental thing – it’s a fundamental marketing medium.

People are spending a lot more on search – but its not always easy to tell

• Some due to contextual pollution of figures… (print ads, video ads will make this worse)
• Some due to click prices rising due to better conversion tracking, more competition, brand money flowing in
• Some due to increasing volumes

Get on the Googletrain!

TWC – we’ll auction off our TV space and we’ll be like Google

AdWords Vs. AuctionWords

It’s search marketing not auction marketing

Magazine Editor Fears Future

Carter from Vanity fair said he couldn’t remember the last ad he saw on Google.

Saving Private Search Marketing

You don’t need to remember the ads

What is search marketing?

Putting messages in front of people who explicitly express desire in something
SEO is that act of doing this by trying to influence unpaid listings – usually crawler based
Search advertising is the act of doing this through direct paid methods
SEM is the combination of both

Search is Reverse Broadcasting

Broadcast advertising (TV, radio, etc) is abll about trying to broadcast and build desire among millions who aren’t interested
Reverse broadcasting is about listening to the millions broadcasting their immediate desires on SEs (its supremely efficient and there’s nothing like it)

What Search Marketers Do

Identify key desire broadcasting stations (IE the major search engines and niche players)
Understand how to feed and optimize messages shown on these stations
Scout the location, write the dialog and deliver a customized commercial
It’s a unique job – be proud! An army of marketers that no one has ever seen before.

What Search is Not

Having an auction doesn’t equal having search’s reverse broadcast impact

Contextual Pollution

Google & Yahoo! just reported earnings but didn’t break out contextual from search
Lumping the two together pollutes the data

Generations of Search

Vertical search part of 3rd gen jump

• 1st gen: words on page; humans
• 2nd gen: link analysis
• 3rd gen: vertical & personalized (links not abandoned; trusted ones used more)

What Is & Why Vertical Search

Info…News…Health…Shopping…Music…Video…Cars (he left out porn)

Narrow focus/index/database means less off topic junk
You can sort in different ways, use different display metaphors

Personal/Social Search

Reshaping results based on:

• What you personally do or visit
• What others you know visit
• What people is aggregate do or visit

Definitely helps to solve the spam problem by greatly multiplying the “fronts” in the arms race. What you see on your computer is different someone else with different criteria.

Google’s Personalized Search – how your results are different based on what you like…

Getting back to his original question about decongestant for Vanessa – he searched for the dosage on Google and got the results – unfortunately they were for an elephant…

Success in Gen 3

Watch the verticals, focus on key ones for your industry
Have great content
Especially great titles and descriptions (for viral, etc)

Going Beyond Search

Search players are looking beyond search (contextual moves / Google doing print, radio, video considered)
They want to drag you and your money with them
Do you go?

Metrics Marketing

“Are you a performance marketer or a search marketer?” – Danny’s keynote 2004
Today – better term may be metrics marketing
All marketing mediums will continue to shift towards accountability through solid metrics

Search: Here to Stay

Search is now a fundamental advertising medium like TV, radio, print and outdoors
Search makes prime time – David on Martha Stewart – “When I search for Martha Stewart – I don’t get recipes”
Pontiac – “Google it” & Remax – Google Earth

Future: More Integration

Search will be part of an overall ad/PR campaign
Campaigns may even more and more seek to drive searches, as a way to build brand and sales
Search will pull money from other mediums

Future: More Complication

MSN is giving demos/dayparting – more options and more decisions
Non-search products will continue to be tossed at advertisers
Automation

Future: Other Things

More vertical, more personal
Perhaps more balance for paid & organic
More lawsuits

Privacy Challenge

• AOL releasing data and the lady being able to be tracked for example
• Still nothing has really changed
• Talk of control and export of our data all this week but still no controlCopyright Challenges
• Belgian papers sued Google, now removed by court order
• Opt-out works on the web b/c of automation and need to read
• Anywhere automation for permission to index works, we need to support it (books, no / cached, while automation allows, is more then indexing / so too may be images)

Leaving Search Engine Watch

New site where he, Chris Sherman and Barry Schwartz will be covering search
Daily news blogging at http://www.searchengineland.com launching Dec. 11
Still doing his www.dailysearchcast.com

Q&A

Question: Jay Sears from ContextWeb – can you talk about where you think contexutal is most relevant?
Danny: I don’t follow it closely enough. I would point to someone like Jen Slegg who tracks it closely. I love contextual advertising – I just mean it’s not search – it deserves its own treatment.

Question: I am expecting some big watershed privacy lawsuit and the implications – can you comment to that and what will happen after that? Also – what is the current start of the copyright laws?
Danny: AOL is the first part and if its like the class action suits from click fraud – there will be a small settlement. I am pessimistic about it. More likely you will get laws enacted – the politicians will get worried. File a freedom of information act request for a senator’s office – you’ll have a law pretty quickly… Re: copyright laws – they are nowhere caught up. That’s why the Belgian case is interesting to watch.

Question: What’s your opinion on using search marketing for brand awareness?
Danny: I’ve heard lots of people who say it works but I haven’t seen that good case study yet. But I know personally it works for me (uses an example of J&R in New York).

Question: If a website can put a no cache tag on a page – why can’t we do it on a search query?
Danny: One bad thing you might not want to flag the things you don’t want everyone to know about. Perhaps extending the personalized search control panel. I would like to see them move ahead with it collectively.