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Stock Market Volatility Creates Search Market Opportunities

by Chris Copeland ~ September 13th, 2011

“Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night” – Bette Davis, All About Eve

Debt ceiling debates, S&P downgrades of U.S. credit ratings, wild swings in stock market levels and a global economic crisis drifting back towards recessionary conditions. The last month has been nothing short of a seat belt-necessary roller coaster of a ride. And with continued European instability, debt panel negotiations and waning consumer confidence, one cannot be certain if the tunnel light is that of daylight or an oncoming train ready to crash into the struggling global markets.

That said, the intensive activity and consumer interest have created a unique opportunity in the biddable marketplaces online, specifically in the search markets. With any event, whether it’s entertainment, sporting or political in nature, there is bound to be increased query activity as users search out the topics of interest. Unlike entertainment-type activities where plans can be made and budgets can be allocated in advance, these economic market shifts create opportunities that advertisers still seem unable to act upon.

August 2011 proved to be the tenth most volatile month in the past 75 years, whereas the Dow Jones industrial average swung an average of 1.9% each day of the month. Research by GroupM Search in recent weeks shows a substantial increase in search query volume and advertiser visibility when the stock market takes a hit. In the days around the 4% stock market dip across the major indexes on August 4, searches for the Dow and S&P 500 increased by 231% per Google Insight for search data. Not surprising as everyone watched their net worth plummet then yo-yo off those lows to their current resting place. But what happened next is a cautionary tale for large advertisers and an opportunity for other advertisers if buying habits do not change.

In a normal search buying cycle an advertiser has months of historical data by which to set their bid strategy, including their daily budgets. When crisis hits, the spike in queries means excess opportunity which is desirable unless the crisis appears to have massive financial implications for your brand – just as stock market volatility has proven to have for the finance category. In a situation like this, the excess queries mean budgets are spread thinner and what may have been 100% share of opportunity coverage suddenly becomes a lot less. With less coverage, gaps are created for smaller advertisers – those with poorer quality scores or lower max bids – to enter the mix.

In the two weeks of stock market volatility and heightened debt ceiling chatter in early August, a combination of increased queries and fixed budgets from the primary advertisers led to a substantial increase in appearance of a secondary tier of advertisers. On average, there were 70 unique advertisers who found their way onto the front page of Google for core financial terms – an opportunity that didn’t exist prior to the market decline.

Weeks later, as the Dow Jones industrial average and S&P 500 index dipped again on August 18, our research revealed a strong and statistically significant correlation between total stock price change on a given day against their Google index for search volume. Since the first market drop, the average number of search advertisers to-date remains stable and high, having peaked again during the second market dip in the back half of the month.

What does this mean if you’re a brand in the finance sector – or for any advertiser at large? If you are a brand that struggles to crack through the green ceiling of well-funded major advertisers, a crisis or noteworthy topic capturing widespread attention such as this is a rare opportunity to gain exposure on key terms, even if it comes at the bottom of the page. If you are an advertiser whose first reaction is to hold the line, or worse, cut spending, then you must do so with the knowledge that consumers don’t stop when things go bad. As seen during other events of significance or widespread news, they flock, en masse to the web, and will seek out the brands willing to share valuable content.

If you are a big brand, you cannot run from search, ever. You must double down because the opportunity to get your message into the hands of people who find it relevant is even greater in these moments. If you have struggled to crack the first page of a Google search engine results page, then these opportunities are gift horses to be ridden, not stared at, and you should be prepared. Consumers have an unending need for more information. Moments like these show which brands understand the true power of relevancy in search.

This article was written by Chris Copeland, CEO, GroupM Search – The Americas, and was published on Musings from GroupM at MediaBizzBloggers.com, September 13, 2011. Follow Chris on Twitter – @SearchBoss

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Why It’s Time to Define the ‘Who’ in Yahoo

by Chris Copeland ~ September 8th, 2011

Before Next Leader Is Named, Company Must Reconcile Exactly What It Aims to Be

Carol Bartz is finally out at Yahoo. Gone as well are investor and industry confidence, and nowhere to be seen is the $30+ share price offer for acquisition that Microsoft once made. The Bartz legacy will likely be summed up in the phrase “couldn’t articulate a vision.” That early postmortem comes despite the fact that what Yahoo got from Bartz would appear to be precisely what they hired her to give them. From day one to her final email, Bartz was a straight-shooting, organization-tightening leader with a history of success in the Valley.

The problem is Yahoo is less about the Valley and more about Madison Avenue and Main Street than any other major player in the space.

So, while bets are being placed on the next leader of Yahoo, it seems that Yahoo’s board of directors must first reconcile what exactly a post Yang, Semel, Yang, Bartz really is. We know what it is not, a search engine. Bartz from day one went to great lengths to distance Yahoo from comparison with Google, and on that front one must declare her efforts a success. No one today would confuse what Yahoo has become with Google.

The efforts made over the past two years to publicly convince users, the street and advertisers that Yahoo was a representation of YOU and that its future was in premium display has been upended for any number of reasons. From multiple reorganizations that changed the legacy of an industry by defining sales culture to an identity crisis caused by forsaking the origins of the original tech company and search leaders, the talent drain and vision loss has been significant.

Before wagers are placed on potential successors to lead the battle cry of “YAHOO!”, the question to be addressed is: Yahoo? Is it still the world’s homepage? The numbers suggest Facebook and/or Google have a more legitimate claim to being the true owners of that doorway. Each certainly has found ways to monetize engagement both at scale and by influence better than Yahoo. There’s little debate over the quality and depth in many key verticals (news, finance, sports), but what does that make them?

If not a search company and not a scale play that can monetize as effectively (the same problem that led to the still questionable Yahoo-Bing alliance), then where does Yahoo go from here? There’s an “easy” answer and it’s sitting 850 miles north of Yahoo headquarters. That, of course, is where Microsoft sits today, and for far less than what was offered a few years ago, Microsoft can finally cement their position as a player in the digital age. That’s not to say a Yahoo acquisition is right for Microsoft — but it’s a viable end game for Yahoo.

But let’s say Yahoo wants someone who can lead them to prosperity as a stand-alone. It was what they hoped for when Jerry Yang returned to the chair and what Bartz was tasked with doing. In both cases it appeared the end game (fending off Microsoft for Yang and right sizing the organization for Bartz) was just the wrong answer. It would seem the answer for Yahoo absent of acquisition is as the pre-eminent premium content play on the web. To do that properly the culture and components would need drastic attention. Acquisitions (AOL? Hulu?) would be in order and a return to a sales-driven culture that aligns with Madison Avenue, as described in this article on The Makegood.

Yahoo was the digital brand many in this industry grew up with and the depth of talent it has placed around the industry is staggering. Can it return to prominence without search, mobile and social at its core? That’s a huge hill to climb for the next CEO, if that’s really the job. In honest assessment, when Yahoo does determine “the who,” it will likely say everything about “the what” to come for the organization.

This article was written by Chris Copeland, CEO, GroupM Search – The Americas, and was published in AdAge, September 8, 2011. Follow Chris on Twitter – @SearchBoss.

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Google’s Not Making You Stupid, It’s Making You Obsolete!

by Chris Copeland ~ August 23rd, 2011

In 2007, Mashable claimed that Google was making us dumber. In 2008, Nicholas Carr of The Atlantic went deeper, proclaiming that we were, as a society, becoming stupid in part due to the advancements of companies like Google. Carr was so moved by this belief that his cover story became the bases for “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.” And now, in 2011, a team of researchers led by Betsy Sparrow of Columbia University has explored the cognitive effects of having Google at our fingertips.

All of the commentaries, both scientific and anecdotal in nature, explore the impact Google has on us as a society and whether or not our brains are being rewired for a new normal. That said, if given a choice of life with Google or without, I’m betting few people if any would say life was better before the search giant led the information organization and discovery revolution. But, if people are OK with a trade-off of individual wisdom for collective or artificial intelligence, would they be OK with the potentially more catastrophic impact Google is having on our world? That is, the rapid disintegration of the middleclass workforce and its impact of the labor community in our society for the future to come.

Technology continues to change our world, often for the better. Google and many other companies just like it, including Microsoft, Apple, and Cisco, to name a few, are continuing to evolve and advance what we can realize as a people through technology. At the same time, entire sectors of industry continue to struggle with how to handle the changing landscape. In the U.S., river towns gave way to rail, which saw a decline with the construction of a national highway system. We now find a digital superhighway changing our world. Personally, the upside is huge. Professionally, the risks are as great as the opportunity.

Last week, Apple passed Exxon Mobil briefly as the country’s most valuable public company. Is this a staggering ascension? Not the least, because Apple currently has roughly 60 percent of the employee base of that of Exxon. In the advertising sector, you only need to look at the contrast between Google and some of the top marketing communications companies. WPP, the organization I work for, employs more than 146,000 people globally with revenues of more than £9 billion. By contrast, Google is on pace to generate more than $30 billion in 2011 with slightly less than 30,000 employees. These pressures extend to all sectors from automotive to retail as physical presence and headcount give way to virtual exposure and cloud power. Once mighty commerce businesses, companies like Circuit City, Borders, and Blockbuster, are now in the grave or circling the drain at the hand of a new era of commerce led by the likes of Amazon, Netflix, eBay, and Google.

The challenge at hand for every business and individual is to determine how to pivot into the modern realities of technology. It’s no longer good enough to assume that the companies of tomorrow will have a place for the employees of today, because that’s the way it has always been. Are Middle America and middle management destinations or stepping stones? If the American dream of realizing a better life than the generation before you is to be true at an individual level, there is little doubt that technology will play a key role.

But let’s be clear. Technology cannot be realized without the people behind it. Google and Apple only make people, companies, and sectors obsolete if they cannot, or worse, choose not to invest in the talent necessary to evolve into the reality of where the market is heading. The question for employees in this generation and the next is – how will your education, professional training, and personal dedication drive your positioning? Are you setting yourself up to be a player in the future, or allowing your number to be a part of a growing story of a generation without perceived and ready opportunities?

If not then, when the postscript is written on a generation, it may cite that industries and opportunities were rendered useless by innovation and evolution. It will also note that personal evolution and a lack of willingness to change are also cause for extinction. So, back to the thought at hand; Google is making us obsolete only if we are too stupid to change and innovate at the pace necessary to keep up with the leading companies of this age and the next.

This article was written by Chris Copeland, CEO, GroupM Search – The Americas, and was published in ClickZ, August 16, 2011. Follow Chris on Twitter – @SearchBoss.

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Will Search Shift the Social Battlefield Between Facebook and Google?

by Lauren Pesko ~ July 27th, 2011

The Clash of the Digital Titans has finally arrived. There’s Google, from its lofty perch as the search giant, and there’s Facebook, which from its social throne, has taken the mantle of display inventory kings. These two industry titans now find themselves face-to-face in no small part due to Google+’s launch.

For years, Google has tried to establish itself in the social space. Likewise, with every million new users the scale of the Facebook ad network has grown. With +Circles, Hangouts, and the rest, Google seems to have hit upon something of worth. People inside the industry and, more importantly, outside Madison Avenue and the Valley are intrigued. That said, the launch clearly caught the attention of the Social Network. Last week, Facebook responded to one of the most intriguing features of Google+, Hangouts (a group video chat application), by announcing its own solution – a partnership with Skype. Skype is the newest acquisition of Microsoft, another Google foe and one-time digital king.

But, for all the social gamesmanship that comes from this response, it’s likely to do little to halt someone from trying out or shifting over to Google+, if they are so inclined. What would it take for Facebook to evolve into an area that would keep consumers engaging and on site more than they already do? Perhaps the answer is all about the field upon which the battle is being fought. Google has clearly come onto Facebook’s turf, but it’s been attempting to do so for several years, so this is no sneak attack. However, if Facebook suddenly appeared on the search scene, well, I think it would be far most interesting.

In GroupM Search research published earlier this year, we found that consumers form a virtuous circle between the channels. While most start with search, they evolve and move into social when they feel the information available has capped and they want to find other data or get the opinions of others. Google +1, launched a few months back, was designed to be the continuation of Google’s effort (following its now ceased Twitter deal) to bring social into search and compete with Microsoft bringing Facebook into Microsoft’s index.

People don’t want to search. They want to go through a discovery phase, which is about deep and rich data. I suspect Facebook would have little interest in this and could be quite content to fully source this to Bing or just leave it outside the social walls altogether. Searchers also want to reach a destination, and that’s the play Facebook could somewhat easily make.

Imagine you seek to buy a new car, specifically a family SUV. Today, the pattern we have found suggests you use Google or Bing to identify a few candidates and then turn to your peer set to ask their opinions. In that process you may find that a few friends have liked Ford or Honda, but is that level of insight enough? Probably not. You may have to ask questions. Once you get their perspectives, you will then head back into the research loop of search.

Now imagine that instead of this, when you asked the first question inside Facebook, “Does anyone have a recommendation on a great SUV to buy?” the response is a blend of your graph and brand/third-party data. So, Facebook shows you the “likes” of brand pages, ideally with people liking specific models, not just the brand. But it also pulls in data to enable you to see which of those brands and products may be worth further consideration. This deeper search ability does two things. It connects your graph research with your extended research, but, more importantly for Facebook, it keeps you out of Google.

Brands continue to evaluate the worth of a Facebook fan and how they should buy vs. earn exposure. One way to attract brands is to give them connection points. Google built its business through the relevant intersection of content and intent. Using consumer questions in its graph and a better measure of intent could enable Facebook to not only enhance its ad properties, but also re-position the fight with a chief rival.

Regardless, the experience we have seen with Google since Bing started to gain market share suggests that innovation is most likely to be experienced when competition is present. Google+ represents the closest thing to that for Facebook since the late days of the MySpace reign. And whether or not Facebook decides to come to search, competition is present. Search and social will continue to deliver value for consumers in their experiences.

This article was written by Chris Copeland, CEO, GroupM Search – The Americas, and was published in ClickZ, July 19, 2011. Follow Chris on Twitter – @SearchBoss.

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Google's Unhealthy Obsession With Speed

by Cindy Kerber Spellman ~ June 30th, 2011

At the recent Google Inside Search event, the online advertising and search giant introduced several new features specific to mobile and desktop search. Google product events always have a curious cadence and this event was no different. Between raucous employees in the crowd and the painstaking effort to explain the smart technology behind the innovation, Google events can often obscure the real potential of the new features. One brief and obscure event element was Google’s definition of search. Bing has positioned itself as a decision engine and Google has stepped forward and proclaimed that search is about removing barriers from what you seek, preventing your train of thought from being derailed.

One newly announced feature designed to do just that is Google Instant Pages. Instant Pages takes the Google Instant feature (launched last year) and moves the concept forward by anticipating the most popular searches and producing cached entry points with no page load delay. Not since Tom Cruise and Anthony Edwards proclaimed their undying need for speed in “Top Gun” has a duo seemed so singularly focused as Larry Page and Sergey Brin are with improving the speed of searching on Google.

Google Instant pages is the latest advancement designed to shorten the amount of time an individual user spends on a single query. There are billions of queries every month on Google, so the idea that a vast majority could be impacted for the faster is a compelling feature for Google and a technological advancement worth trumpeting. The problem is that Google is inexplicably obsessed with the immediate gratification moment of the individual search rather than viewing the lifecycle of a search journey.

Apparently, the way Google feels it can best assist in this manner is to speed up the search process for a user. That is helpful if what I am seeking is of a nature that one query or even one session is enough. But what happens when I need multiple data points from different sources to further my decision? Or when the realities of life, work, family, etc. interfere with my ability to drill into a topic. As I’ve said before, search is an output that comes from a personal desire to either discover new information or to reach a destination in our decision-making process. Either way, search is often a process or journey, and three seconds saved here and there are nothing to dismiss, but it is not what people ultimately will reward with future behavior and usage.

What people want is a search service that enables them to store and accumulate knowledge as they progress through the process. When conducting our latest Search and Social in the Purchase Pathway research, we found that consumers say they use search for pricing and product research. We also found that the average purchase in high consideration categories such as consumer electronics and cellphones had nine to 11 touchpoints between search and social media. This suggests that consumers will repeatedly search and use the channel for refinement as they become more educated.

Our findings also revealed that in the abovementioned categories, it was taking on average two months to reach a final purchase. And that data point is the one that suggests what Google is trying to do with Instant and now Instant Pages are short-term responses when consumers need long-term solutions. What users of search engines need is the ability to catalog their knowledge as they accumulate it. As people move from search to search over the course of weeks, not seconds, the ability to reference what they have found previously and what they clicked on can enable a more fluid and positive experience.

Google Instant Pages further enhance the destination phase of a searching pattern. I want to know the weather or events taking place in London next week and it will help me. But, the discovery phase that exists in an overwhelming majority of searches is still being underserved. Google states that it wants to help avoid the derailing of your train of thought, but it is building the track for the set with a short attention span and need for instant gratification. Enabling the track with a run long enough to serve this multi-step, multi-session journey consumers are taking to a conversion decision would be a truly ground-breaking effort worth speeding up development on for the market.

This article was written by Chris Copeland, CEO, GroupM Search – The Americas, and published in Instant Insights on ClickZ, Tuesday, June 21, 2011. Follow Chris on Twitter – @SearchBoss.

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1.3 Billion People Say They Don’t Want to Search Anymore – Now What?

by Chris Copeland ~ May 5th, 2011

Thirty-thousand feet above the western United States and staring out another airplane window, it hit me. No one wants a search engine. Last month there were 1.3 billion people worldwide who used search, with comScore reporting 12.1 billion* searches done on Google in the United States alone. The problem with these statistics is they make us think everyone who searched wanted to spend that time searching. We’ve been conditioned by the sheer growth of searching to believe that it was something people desired. In the U.S. alone more than 15 million root canals are performed each year. Useful as the procedure may be, the number of elective procedures was somewhere close to zero.

People can be summed up based on their natural reaction to the following statement: “It’s not the destination, it’s the journey.”

Read that statement to 10 people and you’ll likely get seven people who nod and wax poetic about the journeys they have taken. Then you’ll get three hearty souls that call shenanigans and boldly proclaim that you can keep your journeys, they’ll enjoy more destinations and outcomes.

And that’s the problem with search – it is neither a good journey nor a satisfactory destination.

In recently-released research from GroupM Search, we identified that in key verticals the average duration for a consumer from initial engagement with search, social media, or a brand site to purchase is close to two months. Over that time people have roughly 10 engagements with those three types of sites before converting. If search is supposed to be making our lives better, it has an odd way of doing it if it means decisions come over a period of 60 days and need close to a dozen interactions.

And that’s the problem with a search engine. It is not a destination engine and it is not a discovery engine.

The problem with Bing, the decision engine, is that it is a decision engine for the masses. Facebook inclusion and broader data sets to analyze from the Yahoo alliance can be considered differentiations in today’s market place, but they fall short. Right now, the data we have shows Bing is at best a second opinion engine for many who are Google first users. The reason is that Bing, at the end of the day, is not doing anything that different with the experience. If Bing, or anyone else, wanted to be a destination engine they would create a truly one-to-one engine that uses your signal base to serve up an Apple Genius experience inside your search. Just because a user expressed explicit intent doesn’t mean that it is being matched in the results. The problem is advertisers are spreading their investments around to the potential of the masses versus the singularity of the person. What’s failing consumers at present is not the advertiser match of content but the ability to operate on a platform that facilitates a bidding scenario based of the expectation that a single connection is going to happen and nothing more will be needed.

In this environment consumers spend exponentially more time inside Bing or another engine versus off-site with the constant click and return to search again behavior. The trade-offs for brands are greater investment and depth of exposure happening off-site in exchange for being hyper targeted with an ability to minimize the touch points. If Microsoft were to take the name of another project, Looking Glass, and use the concept of going down the rabbit hole on site with a heavy dose of personal attention, we might truly have a destination engine for brands and consumers alike.

The counter to a destination mindset is that of the journey and its exploration and discovery. If Malcolm Gladwell is right and it takes 1,000 repetitions to become proficient in your craft, then we need engines that encourage better behavior to allow for an appreciation of the experience of the journey.

The behavior being taught today is one where users learn to search, click, return, and repeat. There’s no feedback loop coming back into the engine in a natural way as to the worth a user found from the previous query and/or click.

Today we see more snippets of rich data being included that is designed to help inform the first click but means nothing to us upon return. An engine that would allow curation and evolve based on our behaviors is what more people want than the current model, I believe. This is about the buying process. We know search is used to find products, prices, deals, and opinions. Yet, to go from start to finish is about forcing an individual to select what looks best after an engine has ranked the sites and then requires personal memory to retain the key elements.

Dream with me of an engine that provides the ability to notate your findings, register the most appealing elements, and further refines itself upon that data – not the standard set of generic content that it believes the masses want to see. If people want to discover and explore, then facilitating that is only as meaningful as the ability to let that information reside beyond their individual brains and use it for a greater good. A true discovery engine takes the implicit (I want to go on vacation) and turns it, via discovery, into an explicit (Le Meridien Paris). The role engines play in getting from A to B can be powerful and helpful because it has the ability to iterate the process so that searching becomes discovering and implicit becomes explicit.

For advertisers, the worth of a word becomes measured by the worth of the person along the path and the models that evolve. Nothing is simple when it comes to discovery and destination, but the alternative that exists today is something people don’t want.

This article was written by Chris Copeland, CEO, GroupM Search – The Americas, and was published in ClickZ, April 26, 2011. Follow Chris on Twitter – @SearchBoss.

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Recalculating the Click-Through Rate in Search

by Chris Copeland ~ March 10th, 2011

Much has been made during the past two months about Google losing its fastball in search. Numerous news articles have detailed a lack of consistency, a dependency on content “farms,” and a general dissatisfaction with the experience coming from search with the undisputed category leader. In response, Google has unofficially announced war on those taking shots at the algorithm by implementing changes in an effort to make search more personal, less content dependent, and even more social.

Regardless of the quality changes being made by Google, Hitwise recently released a statistic that caught my eye. It is not a new statistic, as Hitwise has reported on it for a long time. But its implications have not been fully discussed. The statistic is success rate. Simply explained, it’s the percentage of users that actually left the site after doing a search. We constantly talk about the power of search being the ability to meet consumer intent with relevant content. In theory, this number is one way to do so. It would be a more worthy metric if it measured actual clicks on a link on the result page, but it can be a directional jumping off point, at the very least.

There is an inherent problem with this in that more and more searches across all engines are designed to provide information without requiring a click or departure from the site. So, there must be a factor of variance allowed due to people who might type in a keyword such as “weather” and find the local forecast without having to ever leave Google. But, even with those informational queries being met with immediate response, the variances between Bing and Google are surprising. Even more interesting is that the number from January 2011 represents a sizable improvement for Google where it was hitting on less than 60 percent of all queries leading to a click as recently as October.

This data raises at least the semblance of an interesting debate for advertisers on how to think about the success of their paid search program. To date, brands think of the metric “click-through rate” (CTR) as a zero-sum game. Either I got a click or I didn’t. If I did, then we put it in the successful fire category; otherwise it goes in the dud column. However, this metric has been built on the premise that if I didn’t get the click, then someone else on the page did, and therefore my click-through rate suggests that if I had a 5 percent hit rate then 95 percent of all other clicks went elsewhere.

This data says that’s a flawed thought. If one-third of all queries led to no clicks, and, being generous, half of those were informational in nature, then we still have a 15 percent no click due to a failure to properly connect intent and content. If this is correct, then brands would need to do two things:

1.Create a new metric – eCTR – which measures their actual CTR when someone clicked somewhere on the page. This serves two purposes in that it allows brands to know when they really were selected over other choices and also to know when everyone failed to connect.

2.The problem with option one is that to do it right, there would have to be some way to properly track impressions served and receive that data from the engines. The engines themselves would have to provide the amount of impressions that failed to create a click for everyone. However, simply allowing third-party ad serving on search impressions would at least allow brands to modify their messaging to better target when they did fail, whether a click went elsewhere or not.

In a recent blog post, Google’s Matt Cutts takes issue with the positioning of this data and what is a “successful” search. In my opinion, that is changing the conversation away from where real value exists. Brands have a very simple definition of a successful search – one where a user clicks on their brand site. If more than 30 percent of all users are just leaving the search results page without a click, then that moment is not successful for brands, yet they have no way of improving that experience for users based on the material data.

There is not a major search player today in the United States market that has shown any substantial interest in addressing this problem. So, while search engines talk about optimum consumer experiences and creating meaningful connections with brands, it seems they would rather debate the definition of a third-party metric than give brands the insights and ability to impact their own true click-through rate. Until that discussion comes to the fore, brands will be left looking at a number that they have to question. And by anyone’s definition, that does not equal success.

This article was written by Chris Copeland, CEO, GroupM Search – The Americas, and published in Instant Insights on ClickZ, March 2, 2011. Follow Chris on Twitter – @SearchBoss.

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Mobile Saves the Kringle’s Christmas Crisis

by Tim LaGrone ~ December 23rd, 2010

This year, the United States Customs has placed restrictions on the mass import of gifts, however the distribution of coal will not be effected and is expected to increase. There are rumors that it is a move to help stimulate the economy. Santa has been scrambling for a last-second solution for the past two weeks. In act of desperation, his shopoholic daughter, Kristina Kringle, was recruited to carry out the task of picking up gifts from the nice list.

She has been armed with following:

Smartphone
Credit Card
Warehouse (gift storage)
iPad & Laptop
Cargo Van

Filed under: Emerging Trends & Tech, Features | 2 Comments >>

Mobile Saves the Kringle's Christmas Crisis

by Tim LaGrone ~ December 23rd, 2010

She has been armed with following:

Smartphone
Credit Card
Warehouse (gift storage)
iPad & Laptop
Cargo Van

Filed under: Emerging Trends & Tech, Features | 2 Comments >>

Advertising on the Move: Where and When Means More

by Michael Solomonov ~ March 18th, 2010

As the consumer electronics and Detroit auto shows proved not too long ago, the Internet is more accessible and is moving to mediums and locations never imagined. Over the last decade, consumers were only able to perform searches on their desktops and laptops. Now, they are able to browse on their mobile devices on the subway, read the latest best seller on their eReader, look up store sales from their car and research movie reviews from their TV. So what does this mean for the future of search marketing?