“I wish….” or “If only they would….”, if many of you have undergone or said these words, this was the opportunity to tell it directly to representatives from the major search ad providers. What should they fix? What new features should they provide? Come lobby for the changes you want, with others to take up your cause, if you’ve got that great idea.
Jeffrey K. Rohrs was the session’s Moderator, while panelists included John C. Kim, Senior Director, Advertiser Product; Marketing, Yahoo! Search Marketing; James Colburn, Product Manager, Search Strategy & adCenter Go To Market, Microsoft; Tom Leung, Product Manager, Google, Inc and Paul Vallez, Director of Product Management, Ask.com.
First over is Yahoo’s John C. Kim: Basically, he discusses the kind of, and on what Yahoo! would like to receive feedback. Begins by saying, some of the things we’d like to give you to think about are:
- Trends/Key Hypotheses
- More Search Tools Developing To Improve User Experience
- Search Formats and Types are Changing
- Best of Breed is Still King
- Off-Browser Search Could Explode
- Ranking and Matching Based on Personalization and Community Factors
Implications:
- Need More Data – SKU level information, meta data
- Needs Ads in Multi-Media Formats
- More Vertical Fragmentation
- More Experimental Models to Emerge
- Less Transparent
More Trends:
- 360 Audience or Action Based Buying
- Increased Bifurcation of Advertisers Into Sophisticated and Unsophisticated Advertisers
- No More Time for Experimentation and New Tools
- More Fragmentations and Customized Needs
- More Focus on Interaction Effects and Advanced Analytics
How do you think these trends will impact you and what do you need? How do we keep it simple for the advertiser? What ideas do you hope emerge from the commercial API program?
From rival company, James Colburn takes the podium who wanted to stress on AdCenter and AdCenter Labs. AdCenter has been in the market for about 13 months now. In this area, I’d like to know your thoughts on what can we improve… editorials, tools, UI, etc.
adCenter Labs, which is almost exactly a year old, is really being focused on. How many ppl are familiar with the AdCenter Labs? (few hands) How many people would like a quick refresher? (few hands).
Colburn said Microsoft was enthusiastic and intesrested on knowing all the details which would help the company serve its users better, what they expect in the future from Microsoft etc. Like Satya Nadella yesterday, Colburn said they were very keen on increasing query share.
Next was Google’s Tom Leung who kept it short and sweet but covered most frontiers. He said, engineers at Google wanted to know and receive feedback on the following items:
- Seeking feedback on where to improve
- Existing tools and features
- Fantasy wish list for things you’d really like to see
- Outside the box ideas are great. Even those that don’t have anything to do with search marketing
Next to come on stage was Paul Vallez, Director of Product Management of Search Marketing, Ask.com.
- Our focus is to make sure you have all the tools through which you can use our system in the best possible way.
- Is vertical granularity too much?
- Trying to make your advertising campaigns transparent across all ad platforms
- What’s the right interface? API or UI?
- Show the difference between Search Advertising and Display Advertising
Best Quotes of the Session:
- Tom Leung: If you own a TM and you’re very concerned about other ppl using your terms in ads, there’s already a place in AdWords where you can indicate you’d like to prevent other ppl from using your terms in their campaigns.
- I would like to see Google have an alt-text feature or some way that we can specify parameters like misspelled keywords, etc
- We definitely understand your need for transparency, but at the same time, we have to not be completely transparent because by providing too much detail, we’ll be exposing the system to additional exploitation. So we really have to walk a fine line.
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