Part way through the morning and so far all's well. Yahoo kicked of the day with a great panel discussion about the future of search. General consensus seemed to be that search is increasing being
integrated into more and more of the holistic marketing package, but also the distinct skill sets honed in search were in greater demand than ever before. Therefore, while search probably will loose
it's current definition of distinct channel, the search skills will be in greater demand at the strategic table. One of the primary challenges identified was finding great people, particularily
with 3 to 6 years of experience. There's just not that many people out there that fit that description. In the words of one of the panelists, "It's a great time to be a SEM recruiter." We then went
into Jordan Rohan's keynote. Rohan indicated that about 20% of the Internet space reminds him more than a little of the 1999 market. "It's wacky, and I don't understand it. Sometimes the deals make
sense, but the valuations don't." He also indicated that a Microsoft/Yahoo deal is not very likely to happen. "It doesn't make sense." He did indicate that to him, an eBay/Yahoo deal makes more sense.
I know other bloggers are covering this, so I won't go into too much more depth. One further note from Jordan's address. There's still a 45% gap in effective monetization between Google and Yahoo,
even with the post-Panama changes. The panel that's on right now is about integration of search with other media. Eric Facas (Google), Kelly Graziadei (Yahoo) Julienne Thompson Hood
(Advertising.com) and Nidhi Modi (Carat) shared some past successes. Some of the high points, use the search intelligence tools available (Google Trends, Yahoo Buzz) to help reinforce other brand
awareness initiatives with the right keyword buys on the search engine. Also, increasingly, websites are used as calls to action with other channels, but more often than note, navigation to the site
happens to search. Hood shared some success stories with behavioral retargeting on what would have been a lost search lead. One of the challenges is analyzing the engagement with multiple channels
with the current tools. The tools are still struggling with trying to integrate the metrics from offline and online channels. However, research shows that the multiplier effect is certainly present,
but the tools aren't at a place where it's easy to track it. Facas from Google says we're getting closer to this when we can compare engagement with offline vs online videos, but it's more difficult
to do it with disparate channels (ie online vs print vs radio etc)
