BuzzMetrics' Kalehoff Joins Search Start-Up, Wants To Bring Optimization To The Masses

Social media guru and online media pundit Max Kalehoff has walked away from a senior role in Nielsen Online's BuzzMetrics unit to join a start-up in the burgeoning field of online search optimization. Kalehoff, who was vice president-marketing at Nielsen BuzzMetrics, is taking the same role at Clickable, a company that wants to bring the masses the kind of high-powered search optimization tools that are used by the biggest online marketers and interactive agencies.

The core of the service is a proprietary system that optimizes prototypical search campaigns across the major search engines and advertising networks without the complexity typical of big search marketing campaigns. The "sweet spot," says Kalehoff is a search advertising marketplace ranging from mom-and-pops on the low-end to companies billing just under $50,000 a month in search advertising buys, the threshold at which Kalehoff estimates most clients would retain an agency specializing in search optimization.

"We're aiming just below the Google 1,000," he says, referring to the top 1,000 search advertisers that comprise the about half the online search advertising marketplace. The balance, says Kalehoff is the so-called long-tail of ranging from micro advertisers to mid-size marketers who comprise the other half of the search advertising marketplace.

The problem is when small and mid-size businesses start to scale up, they very quickly start to run into complexity in terms of managing different spreadsheets, dashboards and payment systems. It very quickly becomes unwieldy." Kalehoff describes the Clickable system as an "act engine," which is an optimization system that analyzes past search advertising behavior and makes on-the-fly recommendations for optimizing future campaigns. The system will officially launch in the first quarter of 2008.

Kalehoff, who is also a member of MediaPost's Online Spin Board and is known for being a champion of the social media marketplace and the so-called "attention economy," says he's not turning his back on that sector and will continue to write about and promote the growth of social media, as well as other aspects of online advertising.

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