When I fired off the previous post last night, I was essentially unimpressed with the launch of the new paid search (e.g. where advertisers pay for placement in the search returns). I mean Yahoo! bought Overture some time ago, and they were the very first paid search player of any magnitude. Basically, Y! has offered paid search in the US for a very long time (and in French in Canada) so while this new platform (codename: Panama) offers a much more Googly targeting and analytics platform, for the most part I was sorta "ho-hum, it's about bloody time."





But then, I started thinking more about what this means for search marketing in Canada, as a category. And in that context, this move, and the arrival of msn AdCenter, are tremendously significant.





When Orbitz launched in the US, we at Expedia were really nervous about it, as you can imagine. But what actually happened was that their arrival and subsequent spend in advertising and product development actually grew the category in total - so, a bigger pie, growing faster, and more customers for all.





I think that's what will happen here in search as well. To date, the only game in town, really, was Google. So that means that the entire category was being pushed by what that one player was doing to promote it. Now, we will have x-times more salespeople, attention and effort being put against it which should mean more money will move to this channel *in total* and that this may start to become a more core part of an overall media plan.





Now, the fact that Google still represents something north of 80% of Canadian search volume certainly gives Y! and msn a challenge. But their entry should be good overall.





Congrats to Y! on this launch and a great event.





(Posted by blackberry)

Yahoo! is going to start to offer paid search in English Canada.



It's 2006.



So there's your newsflash.

In the past two weeks (or so) I've done interviews with PROFIT Magazine, Canadian Business and VISA's Small Business Resource website. Topic? Broadly speaking, Web 2.0 or elements of it and what the heck it's all about. That's right. It's November 2006, and leading Canadian publications (or more specifically, their Editors) are just now starting to ask "Soooo, what's this Web 2.0 thing?" To which some might say "Where've you been the past 4 years?" But, if you believe this stat from Zoomerang reported by BusinessWeek that 79% of marketers have never even heard the term Web 2.0, you'd be getting closer to the truth.

All of the "is Web 2.0 over and done with?" chattering is simply completely right. If the Regular Folk are now tweaking to it, Web 2.0 as The Next Big Thing simply has to be close to having run it's course, and the bleeding edgers had better get on with figuring out the NEXT Next Big Thing. For the rest of us? Well, let's get ready for the party to...start.

What, you say? But Stuie, you just said it's over. Yup. As New Shiny Orb, it is close to done. But, as Real Thing it might be just starting. And zowie that could be big.

I mean, c'mon, remember when people used to talk about "e-commerce" as a special thing? I used to chuckle then - it's not like people ever called having a call centre "phone commerce" or a store "brick commerce" - it was just new and the leading edgers got there first. Eventually, most people understood that these were all just part of "commerce" and got over it. Bank machines, DVD players, mobile phones, digital cameras. Categories mature and eventually go mass. And maybe we are seeing the start of that happening here, too. If so, that means that the real innovation (and at scale, maybe, too) and real money are still ahead of us.

Web 2.0 won't be a New Shiny Orb indefinitely, just like nothing ever is. Elements of it will just become part of how stuff is done. Big companies and governments will start to use parts of it (like mashups, web services, blogs and wikis), folks who never joined the computer club will find themselves using elements of it without realizing (like adding a comment, reading a user generated review or sharing a photo), and yet another wave of technological change will have washed over us.

Future users will likely never know that there ever was something called Web 2.0, but their lives will be better for it anyway. And that's just fine, I think. It's not like it's anything new.

 

For any of you who may have been keeping track, it took us about 6 months to get our communal acts together and get the keynote podcasts from mesh06 up for public consumption (despite enormous effort by Rob, Mathew and Mike). So this time, just as bad? Not a chance, because we called in a hired gun by the name of Leesa Barnes, the podcasting Queen from Caprica Interactive Marketing who not only did a great job interviewing people at the event, but managed to get them to us barely a few days later. And now, you can listen to what some of the people at the Irish Embassy had to say over on the mesh blog.

Thanks to Mathew for actually doing the post.

 

Without them, we wouldn't have keen insights, deep understanding and clear-eyed, thoughtful commentary.



Oh, and hilarious quotes like this one in today's Globe and Mail story on Air Canada's whimpering IPO:



"Scotia Capital Inc. analyst James David added that the airline industry is known for being a risky investment."



Well. There's your value add right there.



Thanks for comin' out, Jimmy.



(Posted via blackberry)