Search Uncovered: The online treasure hunt

closer to becoming the new broadcast medium, search will become the
gateway for all media content.

The impact on advertising will be dramatic. Most people think search is
just about online ads and text headings, but the reality is bigger (and
sexier) than that. The internet is becoming a distribution channel and
the place to consume premium content such as video (TV ads, film clips)
and audio (podcasts, radio stations). It is enabling customers to access
the honest dialogue people are having about you and your business
online. And search beats the path to all these things.

All of this has huge implications for brands and agencies and offers
both the chance to target users much more precisely than has been
possible in the past. But it also means communication and business
strategies have to adjust fundamentally to a power shift where content
is king, the consumer is more in control and transparency matters.

As if that were not enough, the search giants are starting to threaten
the hold traditional media companies have on advertising revenue as they
move into their space.

Yahoo!, for example, has just signed a deal with five to allow users to
search the broadcaster's website for content, signalling the channel's
acceptance that people might want to watch its TV content online.

Google, one of the world's biggest brands, enables advertisers to bid
for US magazine adspace via a business-to-business online portal and
recently bought DMarc, which uses the internet to sell radio airtime to
advertisers. Revenues that were once seen as the territory of
broadcasting and publishing giants are no longer sacrosanct.

There are 18.2 million people in the UK using broadband at home, which
equates to 71 per cent of all internet users, and 90 per cent of web
users have turned to search engines to find products or brand names they
saw in a display ad, according to research by Yahoo!. And eight out of
ten people habitually use search engines to find website addresses they
only partially remember, the same research says.

Search is the gateway to everything we do online, so being visible on it
is an absolute must for any brand or product that wants to access people
via all the different media touchpoints. In a world where consumers can
now "pull" content out of the internet for themselves, when they want
and how they want, advertisers are being given the chance to offer them
what they are looking for on their own terms.

Opinions are mixed when it comes to the potential of traditional search
listings - Yahoo! and Google, the two biggest players, recently
announced profits were down nearly 80 per cent and up 77 per cent
respectively. But the opportunities search technology affords other
advertising media are mushrooming.

Damian Burns, the head of agency relations at Google, says: "There's
currently a mindset of segregation where you have analogue media and
digital media and digital is still the minority. There's going to be an
analogue switch-off in the marketing mindset to a sort of
high-definition advertising that transcends all media."

Branding, but not as we know it

"Search is a response-driven 'pull' media and it's much better at
converting businesses into sales than it is at building a brand. Anyone
who tells you different is smoking dope," Jim Brigden, the managing
director of the Search Works, a specialist agency, says.

But the way that search works with other branding tools, such as TV and
outdoor advertising, is fascinating.

"The way that people respond to a television ad they are interested in
is to search for it online," the regional vice-president of Yahoo! and
Yahoo! Search for Europe, Stephen Taylor, says. "They may put in the
brand name or a bit of the URL that they remember, or they may put in
the sector."

Chrysi Philalithes, the vice-president of global marketing and
communications at the search engine Miva, says: "Brand marketers should
be looking at search as a tool to help them build up category ownership
online. An example of this is Huggies - its website does not sell
nappies online; rather, it is a forum to share and learn. And it is
using search marketing to bid on key words such as 'nappies' and ensure
that it is front of mind."

It gets better. Branding tools as we know them - the rich, engaging ads
- could potentially be added to search. Video and rich media is already
a huge part of internet content, so what if it appeared in search-engine
results rather than just on websites? None of the major search engine
operators are doing this yet, but it could happen - Miva has been
serving logos on its searches for ages.

However, it is possible the most exciting potential lies in search as a
gateway through which people can access TV and radio ads and other
content they might be looking for. Google has just launched a service
that allows advertisers to serve video clips, in little boxes, to the
sites of affiliated publishers, so if you are on a site for IT
specialists, you could well see Dell's latest TV ad by clicking on a
still that has been served to the page.

Google and its rivals are hoping that if BMW can broadcast its
advertising online to people who actually want to see it, it might be
possible to persuade BMW to shift some of its media budget out of
expensive TV and on to the internet.

The growth of internet protocol TV - television via broadband lines -
reduces our most well-known broadcasters to mere content producers. Many
are already making tentative steps towards making their content
available online.

Within just a few years, a significant proportion of the population
could be watching TV content and using the internet via the same device.
In the US, TiVo has talked about becoming the Google of TV by enabling
search through television. TiVo customers can already programme their
personal video recorders via a partnership Yahoo! website - speculation
expects Yahoo! to exploit the potential of the TiVo alliance by putting
some of its advertisers on to the PVR service.

Right on target

One of the greatest strengths of search is that it serves relevant links
to people who are already looking for specific goods, services or
content. The existing targeting capabilities of search engines are
largely limited to the keywords users put into the search box - the more
keywords a user enters, the more targeted the search can be. If you type
"cars", for example, you will be served car brands.

But if the search engine could also tell advertisers how old you were
and whether you were a man or a woman, then the car brands would become
more relevant.

The major players are building up to this kind of individual behavioural
targeting with the creation of a new breed of search engines that use
registration data to make ads more tailored. Microsoft's new Ad Centre
product, already functioning in the US and due to launch fully in the UK
in the next couple of months, links Microsoft's Passport system with
search queries. So as long as a user is signed into their Passport
account while they search, advertisers will be able to target them based
on gender and other factors. They can also use their behaviour online to
understand more about the effectiveness of their advertising.

Location, location, location

"Local search is a key growth area. Kelsey Group expects web-based local
searches to grow from £1.9 billion globally in 2005 to £7.5
billion by the end of the decade," Philalithes says.

At present, search results can be targeted locally if the user types in
a postcode or area with their search query, such as "dentist, E1".
Pay-per-call is already a popular local search tool - publishers charge
local advertisers for calls generated by search engine listings.
"Pay-per-call is likely to be at the crest of the local search wave. For
the first time, the 2.7 million small to medium-sized enterprises
without websites and the countless more with non-transactional sites are
able to use the web as a viable marketing channel. Local search and
pay-per-call go hand in hand," Philalithes says.

The flip-side to local search is the ability to deliver search results
locally, for example to handheld devices such as mobile phones. "The
interesting development for local search will be on mobile. Using GPRS,
search engines will know where you are and, based on what you want, it
will tell you exactly where to go and download a map to your phone," Ben
Wood, Carat Digital's joint managing director, says.

Once this new service starts to take off, users will be able use their
mobiles to search for things in their area. They could then be served
with a link to a map or phone number of a restaurant, or shop, or
hospital just around the corner. Subscribers using mobile search tend to
look for an experience that offers answers and actionable results rather
than links that lead to more searching, which may lead to higher
conversions for advertisers. As well as that, clicks that result in
calls, merged with the phone user's data, give advertisers more insight
into who their potential customers are.

The art of social networking

Search companies have also set out their stalls to take advantage of the
explosion in online community sites such as MySpace and Bebo. Say you
want to canvass opinion of something - you are going abroad, for
example, and want to find out how people rate a certain Paris hotel. New
social search products, such as Yahoo! Answers or Google Co-op, allow
you to access the opinions of people who have already stayed there, or
to submit your own answers to other people's questions via dedicated
engines.

"The challenge is to build a big enough user base for it to have the
quality of answers and questions to make it a decent tool," Wood says.
"Potentially, it is the future of search marketing - it's better to ask
someone for an opinion about something than it is to ask a machine or a
robot."

For advertisers, social search raises lots of control issues - what if
someone says something negative about your brand online? AOL's Brand New
World study says 40 million US consumers changed their minds about an
online buy as a result of online information and 77 per cent of online
customers say that if they saw a negative internet review about a
product or brand, they would think twice about buying it.

For brands, search means the ability to track conversations consumers
are having about your products and trying to influence those opinions,
identifying influential bloggers in the same way they might have
approached print or broadcast journalists in the past.

"There is no definitive model as yet. Consumers are no longer solely
influenced by the obvious features of price - they want an independent
view, which is why they're seeking reviews from other people who belong
to the same communities," Faith Carthy, the group managing director at
i-level, says. "You have to be careful as a brand in trying to influence
those groups."

Next week: Gaming Uncovered.
WHAT SEARCH MEANS FOR ...

AGENCIES

- You need to discuss a search strategy with your clients - neither you
nor they can afford not to

- The ability to relate what your clients do offline to online. Take the
opportunity to think big - search isn't just about text links

- A new tool to mix branding with direct response

ADVERTISERS

- Make sure your brand is visible on all the major search engines

- Connect your website strategy with your search strategy - search is
the gateway to sales

- Don't think that no rich media on search means no branding power

- A chance to get involved in the conversations that consumers are
having about your brands.