Google – Search Engine Roundtable – 360i Summit

Chris Theodoros, Director of Industry Relations, Google

Marc Cote, Sales Director, Yahoo! Search Marketing

Stacey Harris, Agency Marketing Manager, MSN

Roger Barnette, President, SearchIgnite (moderator)
Google

Chris Theodoros, Director of Industry Relations at Google presented on “Connecting Assets: A Competitive Advantage.” He gave a brief history of the proliferation of information, going from papyrus to the Guttenberg bibles to the electric telegraph to the current era of digitization.

“Think about that feeling you have when you know something exists and you can’t find it,” he offered.

It’s a sign of models shifting, of consumer thought and behavior shifting.

Four key points:

1. Advertising should be measurable, accountable, optimizable

2. You should only pay as much as you have to

3. Your advertising should be flexible

4. Your communications should be asset-based, not campaign based: if you produce it, you have to be there when the consumer’s looking

Next step: What’s an asset? Products and services, points of distribution, customer experience, strategic equities, executional equities, internal people.

As an example, a technology company’s assets may include brand families, products and services, broad go-to-market themes, industry solutions, web pages, case studies, product data sheets, white papers, webcasts, press articles, events with presence, major sponsorships, active employee blogs, print ads, TV spots, major global partners, HR initiatives, and languages.

Google fits in by unlocking underleveraged assets. “That’s really all we talk about at Google now.” Spend some time listening to consumers and spend the time to optimize. He calls consumers the billion “media planners,” so marketers need to optimize around them.