Interesting story on the Bloomberg wires which follows up on the Yahoo Search & Display Advertising deals sealed last week with WebMD and Forbes.com.
Microsoft’s Senior Vice President Brian McAndrews says that too much emphasis is being put search marketing & search advertising, and predicts that more advertisers will make the switch to online display ads.
With profiling, behavioral targeting and post-search targeting becoming more of the online advertising mix, this may indeed be the case over the next 4 years, and helps explain the Google, Yahoo & Microsoft acquisitions of DoubleClick, Right Media, and Aquantive … but I really do not see this being a switch, especially since search powers the success of display advertising.
User intent is defined by user profiling, search terms, social network profiles, past behavior, sites visited and so forth. If post-search display advertising is part of the mix, then search is essentially part of the mix. If search is powering the decision on which display ad is being served, isn’t that display ad essentially a search ad? Or at least partly a search advertisement.
“Search has been a significant driver of growth” for the online ad industry, said McAndrews, the head of advertising and publishing at Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft. “In the next several years, it will not be as much of a driver. Some of the emphasis will shift more toward display ads, toward video, toward rich media.”
I really do not see that much of a division in search advertising and display advertising, in fact; user profiling, campaign optimization and behavioral targeting has been in existence for years, back when Advertising.com was not part of AOL still Teknosurf.
It wasn’t until behavioral targeting was merged with search and contextual, that the practice and implementation became more rounded and mainstream. The merging of these technologies and companies (eg. Yahoo & Right Media) will lead to more all around cost efficient and targeted advertising campaigns, and not a switch from one division to another.
