I had the pleasure of meeting Ron Carpinella last night at the monthly gathering of the South Florida Interactive Marketing Association. Ron is Google's general manager for the southern United States. From the get go, he made a good impression.
Ron casually strolled into a conversation that I was having with some newfound colleagues of mine from Comerxia.com. He was generous enough to field some questions that me and my colleagues offered up, then went on to prepare for his presentation. Ron came off as very down to earth guy. He didn't field my specific organic search questions (no big surprise), but he was very accommodating for the most part.
Now on to the presentation:
The main focus of the presentation centered around (you guessed it) Adwords and Adsense, but Mr. Carpinella did take some time to go through a brief lesson about the history of media marketing, the genesis of search engines, the present state of search engine marketing, and the future of Google search.
Here a couple of key points that were made:
1) Mass Marketing is dead. Other than the Super Bowl, there is no longer a means for reaching all market segments. The proliferation of cable TV, websites, blogs, and search engines has had a massive effect on the way that marketers reach their audience. Ron stressed that a successful marketing campaign must aim to spread out across various media spectrums, mixing online and offline techniques.
2) The market has changed. The consumer decides how and when they will enter the market for a product or service. Gone are the days of a marketing campaign telling the consumer when and what to buy. The consumer decides when to make a purchase.
3) Search Engines are taking a huge chunk of the media market segment, yet they remain a very cost effective means of spreading the word about your product or service. Ron made an extremely interesting point about the relationship between Advertising Spend vs. Media Consumption. According to his figures, the Internet represents roughly 3.5% of all advertising spending yet it accounts for roughly 14% of all Media Consumption by the general public. I take this to mean that while Internet advertising budgets are relatively low, those "low" budgets are reaching 14% of the public.
4) Google is not a Portal. I specifically asked Mr. Carpinella about whether or not Google planned to roll out a version of "My Google" similar to what Yahoo already offers. As many of you already know, Yahoo's "My Yahoo!" product is in essence a customizable personal web page that also serves as a news aggregator for RSS news feeds. Mr. Carpinella reinforced the idea that Google is not trying to become a portal (like Yahoo and AOL). They want to be an information resource. In other words, they want their users to come to Google, find their information, and go on to another domain.
5) Google is committed to the quality of their information and their ability to help users find the information that they are looking for. Mr. Carpinella also reinforced this idea. I think that this is very important. When you consider that Google told its financial analysts that it plans to devote 70% of their resources to their search engine, that they do not want to be a portal like Yahoo or AOL, and that they hire PhD's from around the world to engineer their search, it seems like Google is truly committed to offering a refined search utility to their users.
6) Wireless is the future! You can figure this one out on your own. Take some time to research the level of sophistication that our neighbors in the Far East possess. According to Mr. Carpinella, cell phones and other wireless devices will serve as a lifeline in every sense of the word.
Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get into specifics regarding organic search. Ron admitted that he is not really on the engineering side of things. Still I was able to gleam some helpful insights from his presentation and from our personal discussion. If nothing else I came away feeling that Google is not the money driven tyrant that many SEO folks portray it to be.