• Ad Age, Tuesday, April 25, 2006 12:16 PM

Companies that launch elaborate, multimedia marketing campaigns that do not include a search component run the risk of missing a potentially valuable opportunity to establish long-term relationships with their target audience. The reason is simple--research shows that consumers head straight to the Internet to research products they learn about from TV and print ads and to decide what products they should buy. Laptops share the couch as consumers watch TV, according to a SIMM study that showed 66.2 percent of consumers regularly use TV and the Internet simultaneously. But even though search engine research has become a daily, routine part of consumers' shopping behavior, a surprising number of marketers have yet to adjust their advertising strategies to address this new reality. "Search is the place where the consumer connects the dots and, if you are not there, they will not seek you out online and not engage with you offline," says Cam Balzer, director of search strategy, Performics, a division of DoubleClick. But search agencies complain that just a minority of marketing plans include search media. No one has yet estimated how many dollars are lost by not integrating search, but anecdotally the potential hit to marketers is huge. "The risk to marketers is they do a great job creating interest and awareness... then someone sees a search and doesn't see your brand, so they go nowhere," Balzer says.

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