• Rimm-Kaufman Group, Friday, September 12, 2008 3:16 PM

Alan Rimm-Kaufman digs into some topics discussed on NPR during his morning commute, including Google's launch of Chrome, the Feds' Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac bailout and the United Airlines bankruptcy debacle; managing to tease out the search marketing insights gleaned from each one.

The pros, cons and advertising angles of Chrome have been hashed and rehashed, so we'll get right to the Fannie/Freddie bailout. Though the mortgage giants' bank accounts have been secured, 30-year mortgage rates plummeted. "What's the paid search angle?" he says. "For PPC advertisers, the conversion value of traffic on terms like 30 year mortgage likely just changed significantly, and it did so extremely quickly."

Rimm-Kaufman says that this highlights the need to have a human oversee any automated bid management system, since the programs have likely been crafted on algorithms that don't respond to such dramatic marketplace changes. As for UAL, the fact that the airline's stock tanked on recycled bankruptcy news is one more example of the "terrifying speed of the web, and the implied authority conferred by [the] top spot on a Google SERP," he says.

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