While search technology naturally evolves, we must also recognize that human’s usage, expectations & desires for search are evolving as well. As marketers learn to leverage the information, tools & channels available now, we need to be cognizant and welcoming of the evolving search trends on tomorrow’s horizon. Who should be playing catchup, search technology or the human brain?

Search Engine Strategies San Francisco invited three bleeding-edge thought leaders to examine the question, Search: Where to Next? The attentive SESSF audience were treated to a mix of  marketer’s, toolmaker’s, user’s & search engine’s perspective on the shape of search to come. Moderating this discussion was Graham Mudd, Vice President of Search & Media at comScore.

Speaking first was Marc Poirier, Co-Founder & CMO of Acquisio
There’s a huge discrepancy between how much time we spend consuming media online and how much money we spend. 34% of media time is spent online, but online only represents 12% of overall media spend. There’s a disconnect. Media spend is predicted to double in the next few years and this is not new money, it will be coming from traditional channels.

There are three new technologies that Marc thinks will be most important in the next few years:

1. Attribution. The ability to track, not just inside search campaigns, but outside. How channels interact & tracking attribution across channels. Marc says that we have to stop looking at last click attribution and start looking at the bigger picture of various events in the buying cycle.

2. The ability to purchase display like we purchase search. Today, when you want to do a display campaign, there’s faxes and signatures to send, negotiations to make, it’s very complicated. That’s changing as well. Now we have ad exchanges, hubs to procure inventory from different publishers, deciding how you can pay for each impression.

3. Real time Bidding. RTB + better reporting will help us better capitalize on the money that’s there. We have the ability to say how much we’ll pay for each impression and measure success display. We will be paying for display like we pay for keywords. Marc thinks this will be widely available very soon.

Marc thinks search marketing will become part of something bigger. Search is just one of several channels. There is a lot of data across channels & we are going to evolve into performance marketers rather than search marketers. To do this, we are going to have to manage a lot of data. The amount of data you get in display campaign is staggering.

We are going to need different skills in this industry. People with data skills, like statisticians & database admins are going to be increasingly attractive to hire in this industry. There will be a shift.

There’s going to be a change in how we manage internally. This is really a fantastic opportunity to get deeper into other channels, prove performance and ultimately, get more money.

Next up was Brian Kaminski, Chief Operating Officer of iProspect
Brian asks us to think back a few years, to the dominance of the Sony Walkman as a portable media player. It had an interesting ride, not just in market share, but in share of mind. Since then, the technology has obviously changed. Our “portable media world” is now dominated by digital devices like the iPod.

What happened to Sony? As the marketplace continued to evolve, Sony missed a big opportunity to evolve with it. Ferris Bueller best summed it up “Life moves by pretty quickly, if you don’t look around once in the a while, you might miss something.”

Seizing the  Opportunity
What will search look like in the future? This may be a bit bold, but Brian thinks that in 5 years people will not use search engines. Think about it, imagine the rapid evolution that’s taken place from the primitive green-screen computers to the devices we have today. The evolution will be similar for search.

Search is an interruption. Brian doesn’t think people will use search engines because there will be new things to move people to a and b. That’s not to say that this technology won’t have or be built upon search functionality.

How do we impact things tomorrow? Brian has 5 clues about the future of search:

1. Today, the advantage goes to those who are genuinely using the data, not just staring at analytics. Attribution modeling, testing, understanding how everything is connected. Those people stand out from the crowd. Today data is an advantage, but tomorrow it will be a basic requirement.

Marketers need to embrace the change and the move towards data. Invest in technology system that facilitate the use of data moving forward. Invest in people with seriously heavy data skills. It seems odd for marketers now, but will become the norm moving forward.

2. Most search results are one too many. This is a far cry from the future where search results will be much more realtime and much more connected.  It’s starting now with Twitter, but will morph into a wider group of realtime results. Brian isn’t totally sure how this will come into play, but he feels that the social graph and relationships will play a major factor in your search results. Users are much more comfortable with data validated by humans they trust.

Embrace real-time content. Twitter is a little scary because it doesn’t necessarily have the filter that corporate would like.

3. Convergence of new technologies and device coupled with changes in user behavior. User’s will desire content and devices to be more portable. in the future, search will be dominated by non-pc activity and non-pc searches. Mobile search opens up the opportunity for location based targeting and context.

Embrace this content and become comfortable in providing to users in non-pc users. It takes money and adjustment, but will be worthwhile

4. Search is really a net, a capture mechanism. We use search as the net to capture people from all other marketing. More media will be planned specifically to drive search. Search will be at the center of the marketing agenda as it becomes a bigger part of the budget.

Embrace testing of new campaigns. How does email & display affect lift in branded queries or impressions?

5. Today, search is very keyword dominated, the essence of all search. Search will become less about keywords, it will be about leveraging the camera in your mobile device to take a picture and automatically gather data. It will be about barcodes comparing prices for products nearby. These are just a few examples.

These 5 predictions mean that things are going to change, possibly very dramatically over the next 5 years.

Don’t sit and wait for the change, anticipate and jump on the opportunity. Set aside more budget for testing and innovations. Invest in data system and data skills. Continue to think more outside the PC, take other devices into consideration. Don’t be afraid to jump on new trends more quickly.

Rounding out this session was Shashi Seth, Senior Vice President, Search Products, Yahoo!
Shashi asks, how many of us find ourselves overwhelmed with the search results from a query? How many of us use social networks as a proxy for search, asking our friends for information. How many of us spend time on your mobile devices looking for innovation?

(Matt note: I could not accurately capture audience hand counts because I was facing forward & blogging)

Users have changed significantly over the past 12 years. Everyone in the industry faces this problem.  User’s needs have become more complex, the queries they’re doing are significantly different and the amount of time users have is shorter (as is their patience).

People are spending more time on different times of content . More time on images, videos, their mobile devices and social networks. These are all areas that the search industry haven’t invested in as heavily.

The last 12 years have been about the back end of search – crawling, indexing and algorithmically determining relevance. Those were important, Shashi understands the investment. But the front end of search – new sources of information, new ways to get there, getting answers quicker on all the devices you care about, that’s where the industry is headed.

Shashi is often asked, “What exactly is Yahoo search doing, in partnering with Microsoft?” Algorithmic and sponsored results from Microsoft are only part of the equation.

This technology is Yahoo’s canvas for innovation.

They are taking their focus off the backend of search, letting Microsoft handle that. Yahoo is basically taking their scientists and programmers who’ve spent the last 12 years on the backend and moving them towards the front end of search.

Selected Recent Innovations

Deep Web – There is tons of information available with many different way to ask a question. If Shashi is interested in a Spanish restaurant in San Francisco, he can type in Yahoo and get good results. But what if he want to search for a particular menu item, like Paella? This science actually existed in yahoo – taking deep information from structured and unstructured sources where people can ask complex questions and pivot in many different ways.

How often have you wondered about a very specific question like “Who were the last 10 winners of the Nobel peace prize?” or “Which countries where they born in, how many came from Princeton?” Search technology can’t do this yet, but very soon users will be able to get these answers from search engines, rather than a sea of blue links.

Yahoo does a lot of realtime data, recent example with the Olympics and the Worldcup. But Yahoo understands there are many types of realtime, like “when is this train arriving, how much was that stock traded for an hour ago? ” Yahoo is investing heavily into these answers as well.

Shashi says that discover and serendipity will be increasingly important for Yahoo’s users. Data relevant to users’ context and geography.

Panel Discussion Time:

Mudd: I’d like to hear how you think structured data will change the future of the SERPs & how you can use this trend from a marketing perspective.

Shashi: We launched a product a few years ago called Search Monkey, recognizing the immense importance of structured data. That products allows publishers and developers to highlight & markup the information ofntheir pages, so Yahoo can pull that information & incorporate it into search results. We’re recognizing the fact that people want answers, not a sea of blue links. Users are going to be delighted and thankful for that kind of experience.

Kaminski: As a marketer, it’s really about speed and customization. It gives you the opportunity to get your data out there in a customized way. The ability to further customize the data is an opportunity that shouldn’t be missed. It’s better leveraged for customization &  for the speed of realtime.

Mudd: One other way that data can be used is for personalization. For an engine, this provides the opportunity to show more relevant results to the users. For the marketer, it presents a real challenge: Every search result looks different. This is something we all know has been happening for a couple of years. Shashi, how do you think about personalization, where do you see it going in the next couple of years? How do marketers react to this trend?

Shashi: Why is this important? When Yahoo looked at their numbers with 65+ million users worldwide, we asked how many of these users looked to Yahoo to engage for search. We found that only 45% of yahoo users are actually using Yahoo search. Diving deeper, many users are actually spending a fair amount of time on yahoo properties, yet not using yahoo search. When we are actually giving them contextually relevant, personalized and timely information, we find their usage patterns go up. We’re betting on that, when you can personalize to your user base, you’re likely to have higher engagement.

Poirier: For Shashi, do you look at personalized search results and see ways to monetize these better?

Shashi: When the results are personalized, the user engagement goes up and happiness goes up.

Poirier: As a marketer, one of your biggest opportunities is to have as many 1 on 1 conversations with your customer base as possible. Typically, this is very challenging to do because one set of results is pushed and it almost collides with the userbase. I view this as a huge opportunity  to better initiate and sustain 1 on 1 conversations with customers. We all agree there’s a threshold where 1 on1 conversations become annoying and where to cutoff as well.

Mudd: The notion of social as a corpus of information that you’ll see increasingly in the SERPS. with more social results incorporated, the more risk you’ll see in spamming those results.

Kaminski: It’s a tricky line that varies wildly from client to client, from one product or topic area to another. Understand the number of times you want to show the user an ad, at what point are you just plastering the ad in front of them? I’ve seen it be fairly all over the map, but the thought that I had is that many clients go “we don’t understand the data or the magic formula, so we’re almost afraid to start.” I sort of argue with them at times - if you’re hitting 3 out of 10 you’re still going to be in the hall of fame.

Shashi: Social is definitely very important in the next generation of search. For example, if you’re looking for a Nikon D50 camera, wouldn’t it be great if we could cull several of your Facebook friend’s reviews of that particular camera. That obviously brings challenges to bear, like spamming. The interesting juxtaposition for that is that the opportunity  there is significant. Can we facilitate this exchange, these connections on Facebook and make sense of layering this over your search results?

Mudd: From the marketers perspective, when you’re thinking about social, it may be that the way to think about it is, do things you think are truly useful for the user. The Nikon example is a great one. Nikon could really be encouraging users to write reviews of it’s product on Facebook, or whatever channel.

Thus concludes a fantastic session & a valuable peek into what the future might be for search. Examine the implications some of these predictions might have on your own marketing endeavors & end users. You may find you’re aligning with the evolving needs of search users, or maybe you’ve only just learned that “wheel is good, but fire hot.”

photo credit: lorenzwalthert

In 1996 while employed as a CBS affiliate’s Creative Director, our team built the community’s first television station website and started publishing daily news show scripts. It was pretty amazing  stuff. The white paper to station management to procure our initiative’s budget, was that “broadcast television could become minimized or obsolete in light of changing publishing paradigms” and that the station should hedge its bet by “targeting newspaper customers now” by early adoption of the Internet which was “going to become the millennial printing press.”

I moved on from that position in 1998 for the opportunity to found the interactive unit of a venerable Minnesota advertising agency, now Westmoreland Flint. Then was a radically less diversified media world comprised of print channels, network & cable TV, radio and billboards.

One of Westmoreland’s clients was our fair city’s 100+ year old daily paper, the Duluth News Tribune, owned at the time by Knight Ridder. You’ll recall that bandwidth was nascent, 24k modems the norm and Internet penetration only fledgling. However, there was already plenty of free news online to keep early adopters from buying the physical paper. Subscription numbers had already started to decline and it was becoming obvious to some of us that the newspaper industry was already screwed.

The Completion Backwards Principle
The irony was stark. Research clearly indicated the public’s perception, of which news outlet covered news with the most immediacy, was exactly reversed. News consumers believed that radio was the most nimble, always first to the scene. TV was perceived as the next most real-time followed by newspapers. Ironically, any measure of newsroom size, editorial prowess and sheer ability to mine and process news proved that newspapers had the most depth by far, followed by television then radio …exactly the opposite of reality.

The print paper industry never recovered from its failure to leverage superior news gathering capability to turn public perception to reality. By the time they figured it out, newsroom capacity was being diminished by sharp shooting budget whores from corporate, to keep staff cuts up with dive bombing subscription and ad revenue. Sadly it was too late. Algorithmic search engines like Overture, Yahoo and Google had already grabbed the cheese by branding search services that truly were the most immediate meta-sources. Oops.

Early Search Marketer Meets Fatal Newspaper Myopia
I’ll never forget meeting the DNT publisher to present our agency’s recommendations, and how disappointing her lukewarm and nearsighted response. That crisp autumn morning in 1998 we told the Duluth News Tribune to purchase an Avid or Media 100 digital video editor and send every photographer out every day with consumer grade hi-8 video cameras. “Beat broadcast at their own game” we wrote in bold bullet points. Having been inside the television industry, it was plain to see that the broadcast model was vulnerable.

That white paper discussed the vanishing barriers to becoming a “broadcast news hub” and how superiority in news gathering force would win the day if newspapers took action quickly, now-while they still had the might. “It’s no longer required that we procure FCC licenses or build multi million dollar broadcast towers.” Bandwidth is coming in the form of ISDN and DSL.” “Cameras and editing workstations are relatively inexpensive and, in the future, viewers won’t always trust glossy presentations.” We recommended that they “take broadcast on directly, immediately and establish the DNT as the most immediate hyper-local news source on the Internet.”

The second component we suggested was right out of the TV station marketing playbook: “proof of performance PR campaigns.” We said “when you are the first to the fire and publish video, pictures and audio (which could be transmitted by phone patch live) stake that position out in the marketplace by publicizing afterwards. Broadcast TV and radio had successfully parlayed the proof of performance campaigns into market share for years.

The approach was so easy. When first to a news event, CBS 3 was “working for you,” Johnny and Jane on the spot with crucial real time information to serve the public. Newspapers didn’t see it. The Duluth News Tribune and Knight Ridder were dead wrong. Now they’re just dead.

Enter 2010, The Age of Reckoning
So what now? Sadly, newspapers are going out of business right and left. What possible new approaches could be considered to consolidate and grow paper readership to more sustainable results? Being a search marketer, if I was publisher of the New York Times or Minneapolis Star & Tribune– these are the types of radical ideas I’d consider:

1-Stop Giving Away News For Free
This one’s easy. Newspapers are going out of business because middlemen like Google claim a high percentage of ad revenue by current models. On-web page ad sales and AdSense style affiliate marketing simply can’t support newspapers. That’s one of the reasons so many papers have gone out of business. Only allow story headlines and excerpts to index in Google.

Give free online subscriptions to those receiving physical paper delivery.  These physical subscribers are a paper’s best friend. Bundle Sunday delivery, usually a larger audience than weekday, with online subscriptions. Make a big PR deal out of it. Sell online-only subscriptions for 1/3 the cost of physical delivery. This tact is a risk, no doubt. However at the end of the day if readers won’t pay for content by some model, newspapers won’t survive anyway. Gradually encourage readers to transition from paper to wholly virtual goods.

2- Aggressively Open More Channels Live From The Field
Send all field reporters and camera men/woman out with cameras & broadcast real-time. Take national outlets like CNN on directly hyper-locally. In most cities the local paper’s newsroom staff still outnumbers those at television and radio significantly.

CNN sure can’t be at the Duluth City Council Meeting yet thousands of readers want to know what happened. Google has little hyper-local presence and most would-be community news blogs spew irresponsible crap that the public won’t trust. Publish audio and video first from the scene.

Newspaper reporters can offer social experiences to give readers unparalleled access to news and news makers by social channels like Twitter. Be there first, publish first and then do what newspapers have always done best–offer the deepest detail and analysis after the fact to support its ability to be immediate.

3-Beat Search Engines at Their Own Game
Search engines win by indexing newspapers’ content without compensating them satisfactorily. Take them on at their own game by meta-indexing search engines and offer readers the ability to quickly drill deeply into aggregated multi- search engine results framed in the newspapers’ SERPs. Instead of allowing the search engines to profit obscenely from content they did not pay to create, piggyback on top of their free services to spooge revenue from them.

Create localized search engines that index only local content, including what the search engines index. There is a well-traveled legal road giving search engines the right to index content they did not create. For some screwed up quirk of history, the index now has more financial value in society than the actual content. Change the game by offering a more focused local-index, leading with the paper’s own content.

4-Create the “Social Media Editor” Position
Move the newspaper’s Community Manager position to the newsroom rather than the marketing department. Leverage existing channels instead of building expensive applications. When school is canceled from a nasty snow storm, send the alerts out by Facebook and Twitter. Publicize reporters LinkedIn profiles in the print paper and actively encourage readers to connect. There are many other tactics which come to mind easily.

Make the process of gathering and sharing news a more social experience and get readers involved in conversations, closer to the source before stories are published. Offer interactions with news makers and reporters from the field. Publish notable and salient tweets to invite next-gen news consumers to the table. Offer better search of archived “live” events. Publish the best of them in the physical paper.

5-Brand by Proof of Performance
When the paper is first to the event, broadcasts by real-time channels and involves readers to serve the community, use the track record to brand the paper. Proof of performance marketing has worked for broadcast outlets for decades. It’s astounding that the PR/marketing model is not used to advertise millennial real-time channels.

Newspapers have always had the edge in gathering local news. Tragic industry misreactions to the Internet’s emergence nearly sealed their fate in the mid-to-late 90′s. The results might have been different if newspapers had never allowed search engines to index their content for free in the first place. To this writer’s mind, the solutions have not changed all that much since the mid 90′s, though the print news industry has sure dug themselves a deep hole.

Bottom line: Local news gathered by local reporters has a lot of value in this world. We’d hate to see newspapers go the rest of the way towards becoming only artifacts and memories.

Inside AdWords, Google’s official source for information about AdWords, has been trumpeting the arrival of Click-to-play video ads for AdWords. Yippy Skippy I woke up this morning to find the new video ad serving features in our AdWords client manager account interface!

Video (and image) ads now appear on a high number of Google content match affiliate sites and for goods in the Google Network. Google video ads do not appear in organic SERPS (at least for now). Content provider affiliate websites must opt-in to the image ads program and only then are site’s eligible for video ads. Affiliate content providers are provided with tools to choose preset display formats for ad sizes and shapes to display. It’s only a question of time before these ads are served to cable networks, hotel rooms, satellite TV, and other broadcast streams.

What are Video Ads?
Video ads are first displayed as a static display picture. When a customer clicks the play button (or the placeholder image), the video starts to play by one of two methods:

Square and rectangular video covers the whole ad space area, replacing the covering up the placeholder image

Leaderboard, Skyscraper, or Wide Skyscraper format show in only a part of the ad, leaving the static visible while the video plays.

Google ad platform’s slick software automatically sizes the video you upload to fit the selected display format. Of course, clicking on the URL under the ad redirects customer’s to your website. The billing model is based on click-through not impressions or video-plays and there are several video ad pricing options.

In April Google announced a multi-year deal delegating them to cut up and sell a guaranteed inventory of 30-second radio spots on more than 675 Clear Channel AM/FM radio stations. Now it’s reality.

SEM Firms are the New Radio Buyers.
The deal makes it possible for Google search marketing platform Internet media buyers (like aimClear) to reach audiences at designated times in geo-targeted areas. Search marketers are now directly in the brick broadcast buying mix with Google radio Ads even here in Duluth, Minnesota.

Since the interface is within the Google online ad platform, creating and deploying radio advertising campaigns is now in the sphere of search engine marketing firms who have been learning to leverage online media buys in this environment for years. For goodness sakes, after the radio ads run Google even offers reports online to provide marketers with real-time recordings of ads as they were originally played.

Why Google Radio?
Radio and Internet together reach 83% of people ages 18-54*. Each day radio and Internet in aggregate reach approximately 83% of folks between the ages of 18-54 which is comparable to the daily reach of television. Also greater than 90% of the population still listens to radio and 21% of people are listening while online. 57% of people listening to the radio while on the Internet actually look up items in their browser after hearing product commercials. *Source: The Radio Ad Effectiveness Lab (RAEL), 2007.

Ad Creation Marketplace
If you need help creating an audio ad you can provide Google the specifics of what you seek and they’ll help you find a production vendor. Services in the search matrix include script writing, voiceover production , music, singing, and sound effects. You simply provide details regarding your radio advertising objectives and Google uses the information to search their “Ad Creation Marketplace” for “specialists to match your needs.

Once Google connects you with possible specialists, to provide the creative and production services you seek, you can request a proposal. Google takes pains to say that advertisers’ are not under any obligation to purchase any particular vendors services. Google suggests that an average turnaround time might be about 3 days.

Buzz Topic
This topic will likely be a buzz subject for reviews from various factions in the convergence media universe. So far here are the authority blogs which, as of tonight, have weighed in with early commentary and analysis on the matter:
Google Audio Ads See Broad Release
Search Engine Watch Blog by Danny Sullivan

Google Audio Ads Now Live in AdWords
Search Engine Journal

Google Launches Audio Ads to the Masses
Search Engine Roundtable

NAB 1997

Some thought it would come through to your eyes on the good old TV. Some thought the PC was going to morph into the new electronic hearth. Now bring cell phones, game consoles, and portable video devices into the mix making the combo platters of content delivery endless and globally available. Will the delivery of content be a convergence or a collision?

Cable as the Content Gatekeeper
For quite a while now folks in the Internet business have had an endless supply of distribution channels and anyone with a few bucks could start a web page. However with bandwidth reclamation by cable MSO’s and the growing bandwidth highway that digital compression creates cable is finding itself having more space than content. There is very little content control on the internet but since it’s creation TV broadcasters and cable operators have always been gatekeepers. You may spend a few bucks a month to host a website but starting your own TV station or building your own cable head-end is a bit more of a dollar intensive undertaking.

Shift
Slowly as the model for cable is starting to shift (many more content streams) we will have to access to fill all this new space. The challenge for advertisers and their agencies is to find ways to access those eyeballs as audiences’ viewing habits veer father and farther from the beaten path. In the world of cable the new technology of On Demand will lead the way in finding those eyeballs. With On Demand the viewer is choosing the content to view thus making entertainment an active experience as opposed to a passive one. In the old world advertisers looked for audiences and hoped that they would tune in at the right time and day to see the message. Now viewers will seek out those same messages and the information they contain whenever they want to see it.

As I look in the crystal ball it becomes apparent that ads will become more and more intertwined with content, entertainment, information, and the advertising must flow seamlessly together. Not too far in the future, this might be a typical scenario:

On Demand
As you are at work someone tells you about a great episode of a show they saw a few weeks ago, so you go online to the MSO website and have that show downloaded to “Your Channel” on your DVR box. Then at lunch you remember that your wife wanted to watch a movie tonight, so you go online again and have it sent to your DVR. One the way home you’re talking to another commuter on the train about your guilty pleasure TV shows. You text message you box from your cell to download a few episodes of Gilligan’s Island.

Once you and your wife arrive home you tune to “Your Channel” on your DVR. Here are all your shows set for viewing. What you don’t know is that a computer also loaded ads into each of your shows based on qualitative research so that the ads match your buying habits on a nearly unique level. You use your remote, probably called an Air Mouse or something clever like that, and navigate to your movie. As your movie comes up the screen gives you the option to order a pizza right in the screen ad have it added to your cable bill.

You see some ads for Simon Delivers and since you’re spending the night in and since you have a little time before the pizza comes spend 5 minutes shopping for groceries. Any hey, since you’re a move fan how about a couple of trailers for in theater movies, and the chance to pre order the DVD? You spend a couple more minutes looking at the headlines delivered via an electronic publishing platform, then your cell rings and an automated voice tells you your pizza has left the shop ad will be at your door in 7 minutes.

Viola! Convergence. Now, if I could only get the clock on my VCR to stop flashing 12:00.

SEM and “Traditional” Television Can Learn From Each Other.
Anyway among my associates I have a dialog going with the good folks at Charter Communications. Peter Provost, Sales Manager of Charter Communications in Duluth, Minnesota, has been educating me about the daily authority blogs he reads in the broadcast and cable television world. He’s turned me on to publications which are not common fodder in the SEM universe like MediaPost Raw and Online Spin. In turn I have been channeling Peter the authority blogs I read every day like Search Engine Land and SEO Roundtable. I like the exchange of ideas from different perspectives from media players speeding towards the same destination from opposite directions.

We all know how, like two lovers running towards each other in slow motion, the television and Internet industries are on a collision course destined to make peanut butter and chocolate a minor occurrence. It’s that big. What strikes me is how the most important writers in both the SEM and television worlds write about the same convergence issues from the opposite perspective. There is tremendous insight to be gained by both parties to the dialog.

Like it or Not, Here We Come
Think about it. It is obvious that SEM firms will have a noticeable part to play in the new “media buy” paradigm. Sales and marketing executives for companies like Charter are reacting to the radical shifts precipitated by increasing bandwidth, penetration, and audience habits. Cripes, they SELL the Internet access (cable) which is part of the force behind the radical reconfiguration in our industries.

I am salivating to know that Google has made a deal with Clear Channel to sell inventory on all 600+ Clear Channel radio stations from a Google interface on a bid model and Yahoo has a deal with Comcast. Google hired Michael Steib the general manager of strategic ventures at NBC Universal to help work with advertisers to create effective, measurable video advertising.” The list goes on and on representing the gears as they grind into one big measurable machine to cut up and deliver advertising to audiences.

Hence the Convergence Articles
Shortly we will publish the first television/Internet convergence article written by veteran industry executive Steve Frohrip. He writes from the “traditional” television perspective as the Advanced Media Manager/Minnesota, Charter Communications, Rosemount, MN. Steve brings a rich perspective on convergence tooled from over a decade of experience. He saw this coming. Cross media articles make valuable reading for SEM professionals because soon enough we will all be working together .