"The Search" for marketers

If you are a marketer, and you aren't reading "The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture", by John Batelle, you should be. It's probably the best book I've read recently on the changing nature of marketing in the Internet economy. Here's an excerpt about the measurability of Google's marketing model -- that of connecting search intent with advertising content -- that just blew me away.

That is the magic of intent-based marketing -- it shifts marketing dollars from the unknown to the knowable. As Tim Armstrong, VP of advertising at Google, puts it, "search turns a cost center into a profit center."

I asked Armstrong what he thinks marketing will look like in ten years. His answer: "If you can imagine ten years from now every major and small advertiser with a totally digitized marketing asset set, so everything they can market is digitized with attributes against that -- and they have hundreds of inbound and outbound feeds, and hundreds of places that either accept those feeds or pull them in. So in the future, I think marketers are going to be agnostic about where their offers end up; they're going to be driven by ROI [return on investment]. And I think most publishers on the Web [and think of the Web as including television] and most of the other major players on the Web are going to be able to put offers in front of people at exactly the right time. I think a lot of people today think Google and Overture when they think of ROI advertising. I'd like to think in ten years they'd think only about Google, but more likely there will be ad systems in the back and tools that track ROI and conversions among multiple platforms and media. Advertising will be mostly margin driven."

Think about that for a minute. The entire foundation of marketing -- a $100 billion industry driving, well, nearly every business on this plant -- is shifting, slowly but surely, to a new model, one informed by the simple idea of people looking for things on a search engine. No wonder Jan Pedersen, chief scientist for Search & Marketplace at Yahoo, recently quipped: "We think of shopping as basically an application of search."

We have only one thing to add. It's not a $100 billion industry; marketing in the US is a more than $1 TRILLION industry. And when you change the spending of a trillion dollars, it affects nearly everyone.

As an aside, you can read more of John Battelle's continuing thoughts about the evolution of the database of intentions and search at John Battelle's Searchblog

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