Cory Treffiletti knew what he was doing when he asked me to join a panel at OMMA Global NY titled, "Why Display is Better Than Search." Like Emeril
Lagasse presiding over a batch of seafood gumbo, Cory was just adding some spice. Stirring the pot. Kicking it up a notch. BAM!
This was the session abstract:
"Search is the high
school prom king and queen that gets all the attention, but display is the workhorse without which the internet economy would collapse. Search is still 60% of where your online ad dollars are spent,
but it's not where 60% of your time gets spent! Display runs everywhere, it reaches more people, it achieves basic brand metrics better than search, and it is more effective at creating customer
behavior than search. If you attend this session you'll gain a deeper appreciation (and understanding) of how marketers should be using display to drive growth. Hear advice, tips and suggestions from
other marketers and partners who've seen success using online display in their marketing mix."
Now can you see why I was licking my chops?
Fortunately, unlike Gord's panel, our session was not buried inside a room inside a room at the Marriott. And the
provocative session title drove quite a crowd.
From the moment our moderator, Gayle Meyers, introduced us, I made it clear I would be playing the role of contrarian. And, like my kids at the park, I came out swinging.
Search is unique in that it reaches people when they're in the right mindset, I
argued. When people search, they're in between activity on the Web (moving from one site to the next) and actively looking for something. This makes them more open to commercial influence. Display
just sits on the perimeter begging to be ignored while consumers engage with the content they're interested in.
The first rebuttal was a familiar analogy. "Search is just the supermarket
shelf." (Note: I'm paraphrasing here.) "People see your brand in search results when they've already made up their mind about what they want to buy. You need display to make people aware of your brand
and get them into the store to buy your product."
"Fair enough," I replied. (Again, paraphrasing -- and I'll continue to do so for the rest of this column, so please don't misinterpret my
quotation marks as a reflection of the official court record.) "There is value to display and other forms of media that drive awareness and consideration. But if I'm a small business and I only have
$1,000 to spend, I'd rather make sure my product is on the shelf when someone walks into the store ready to buy it than stand outside the store screaming about how great my brand is only to have them
walk over to the shelf and grab one of my competitor's products when they can't find mine."
From there, we quickly got into a game of semantics. When debating if display is better than
search, how are we defining "better"?
It was posited that display is better than search at driving brand metrics. To which I nitpicked on the goal of branding. "Why do we want to drive brand
awareness or recall or consideration?" I asked rhetorically. "To sell our product. Search is what sells products. That's why it has the highest ROI."
This got us onto the attribution topic.
Just because search is the ad that gets the last click doesn't mean it should get all the credit for the sale. This was something we could all agree on.
And, while I was in a concessionary
mood, I offered up that display does have a role in filling up the funnel for search to convert. Once again I stressed that, if a marketer has limited budget, search should be maximized before any
other channel (don't want to get people to the shelf and not find you!) but, once you've maxed out search, display can be a good investment.
That being said, I wanted to be sure we didn't
overstate the importance of display. If search gets too much credit for the last click, display gets too much credit for the post-view. Just because a display ad was served doesn't mean it was viewed.
With exceptions like homepage takeovers or pre-roll video, display ads are delivered adjacent to content (rather than interrupting it) and often below the fold. To assume that these ads get viewed and
have an impact on conversions is quite the leap of faith.
For the remainder of the session, we bantered a bit on the merits of real-time bidding, native ad formats like Facebook Sponsored
Stories, and even the branding impact of search (yes, there is one!), before concluding that Mike Cassidy of Undertone got it right at the outset of the panel when he declared, "There are no absolutes. Search, display, and every other ad channel
has its role in the media mix and deserves consideration."
Amen, Mike. I'll take that to mean display is not better than search -- and rest my case.