Top Trends for 2007

What will impact advertisers’ search marketing campaigns in the year ahead? 360i executives shared their predictions for everything from media buying to search engine optimization.

Dave Williams, Co-Founder and Chief Strategist
Auction-based media will become the dominant method of buying both search and display-based advertising. We will also begin to see significant changes made to the way that traditional media is purchased and evaluated.

John Ragals, SVP and Managing Director
I think that the growth in the demand from marketers for search as a marketing channel will outpace the growth in demand from consumers who utilize search.  This will create increased pressure on marketers to better optimize campaigns as competitive costs potentially drive up the costs of utilizing search.

Jeanine Belsky, Group Director of Client Services
The need for more targeted local searches is a hot topic -- what better a way to fulfill that need than through mobile marketing? Mobile content continues to improve, and with more people using their mobile devices to research information (from inquiring about retail locations to checking their finances), this will certainly continue to be an area of focus. Yahoo has just released a beta of its mobile product, and although volume is initially search low now, steady ramp up is occurring and major advertisers are jumping on board.

Laura Frizzell, VP of Media Services
Expect more options for search engine marketers.  For most of 2006, it was Google, Google, Google, with Yahoo! a distant second and MSN barely hitting the budgeting radar despite much excitement surrounding their AdCenter release.  MSN has been creating support structures related to its platform and ad sales team. Expect them to be focused on growing search volume, which will lead to a greater share of the pie. 

Ask.com continues to upgrade its infrastructure and expand distribution (a Lycos distribution deal was signed in November).  AOL is finally allowing search advertisers to manage an AOL search campaign separate from the rest of the Google network. 

And perhaps most importantly, Yahoo!’s Panama release with much added functionality is expected to close the search budget gap that exists between them and Google.

Chris Humber, Director of Search Engine Optimization
First it was Macromedia Flex (which relied heavily on AJAX and Flash). Now, since the acquisition of Macromedia by Adobe, the newest RIA (rich-internet application) technology slated is “Apollo,” which is allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills (Flash, Flex, HTML, Ajax) to build and deploy desktop RIAs.

Based on early reports, Apollo supposedly makes it easier for search engine spiders to crawl Flash-based applications. The burning question: will Apollo could be the necessary bridge that will allow search engine spiders greater access to Flash content?