We Can Search Dance if We Want To

What a letdown.

I finally make it out to San Jose for my first Search Engine Strategies conference since the one at the Dallas World Trade Mart in November 2001, and the Google dance party is no mas.

We can dance if we want to
We can leave your friends behind
Cause your friends don't dance
And if they don't dance
Well they're no friends of mine

(With all due credit for those lyrics, of course, to Men at Work.)

Apparently, for a number of years, Google has always thrown a big "Google Dance" party at SES. But it seems that the budgets are down and the Google party is over.

Hmmm. IBM must clearly not be spending enough dinero on Google search!

Ah well, that's OK, I didn't pack my big blue suede dancing shoes, and I'm too busy stuffing my brain with new digital marketing tips and tricks and trends to shake a leg.

Including tips from our own agency partner, OgilvyOne, whose chairman and CEO Brian Fetherstonhaugh spoke at SES earlier today.

Brian was offering words of wisdom to the search and digital marketing crowd, here in San Jose and in the social media-sphere in parts beyond.

His spin: CMOs are veddy busy people. They have half-lives nearly shorter than that of the average housefly. And everybody wants to dance with them.

They're being asked to do more with less (more innovation, more ROI, more revenue) but mitigate risk.

A handful of them set the agenda (a handful being 1,000 or so), and ergo the profit destiny of the Ogilvies of the world.

And until the digital marketers can align their interests with that of the CMO, they will be relegated to the margins of marketing history.

Tough lumps, great insight, now get over it.

Fetherstonhaugh observed a number of key trends that marketers, digital and otherwise, would be well-advised to learn from.

The faux globo-digitisation, where "matching luggage" marketing was mistaken for true integration through the line.

Read, my banners looked like my direct mail, thereby passing the wall test, but did the team in Bangalore or Beijing really understand and fulfill on the end-to-end objectives of the campaign?

And in terms of spend, marketers also still lag consumers in digital adoption, who are a good 15 percentage points ahead of most marketing organizations in terms of use vs. shifted budget to digital.

And in probably the most hilarious slide of the session, the observation that most kids with their World of Warcraft interface have a better dashboard than most CMOs (trolls killed, lives saved, etc.)

Fetherstonhaugh suggested the 4 P's of marketing needed to evolve to the 4 E's: Experience, Everyplace, Exchange, Evangelism (for us long red-headed stepchildren in the digital marketing ranks, he left out the fifth E, "Effexor").

By way of example, he held out the Dove "Campaign for World Beauty," the media budget for which was $0.0, but which garnered over 5M views at last count... and, Fetherstonhaugh claimed, $500M in increased sales.

He also pointed out IBM's own "Smarter Planet" campaign, where a recent marketing initiative included a billboard that powers itself, pointedly proving McCluhan's claim long ago that the medium is, in fact, the message.

His advice for digital marketers lost in the big traditional marketing forest with the big bad wolf?

First, start with the customer journey. Use that to explain to CMOs how consumers conduct their product research online.

Two, use search as research. Reposition search queries as opportunities to garner sacred consumer insight.

Three, tastes great, less filling... err, I mean, more lift, less attack. Search is great solo, but it's even more powerful when you can demonstrate the lift impact other media (TV, print, etc.) can have on search results.

And finally, make search a key part of your overall marketing innovation. Make it a key part of your marketing innovation agenda, and don't just simply tout the unique benefits of search.

At the end of the day... or at minimum, at the end of your search session... the CMO has a lot of things on his or her plate, and search currently makes up only about 1.5% of that plate.

If you want to add to the portion size, you must make a compelling business case, align it with the CMO's agenda; then execute.

But most of all, you have to know how to search dance, Google, Bing, or otherwise.