Searching Through the Memories

By Jeff Campbell, VP Product Innovation

On the Tuesday after Labor Day in 2003, 4 folks popped a cork on a warm bottle of champagne engraved “Congrats Resolution Media” and embarked on an incredible journey. With the five-year milestone upon us, I wanted to share my biggest revelations and surprises along the way. I almost laugh reading over some of these as it’s common sense now…but remember, I/we are completely self-taught and there was no one to train us…we learned with experience:

1. One person can’t effectively manage both search campaigns and clients simultaneously. They simply have different needs. It’s hard to believe that when we started, we had two groups: Sales & Operations. After doubling and tripling the Operations group, we were still on the phone/email more than we were in Overture or Excel. The separation between the Client Strategy group and the Operations group was an early bet that most competitors have followed.

2. Don’t make major campaign changes on a Friday. Don’t add new keywords, don’t mess with tags, don’t go and ruin your weekend (or worse…your Monday!!!).

3. Technology is an important investment, but the biggest investment should be in your employees. In the early years of Search, there were two types of Search companies: Technology Companies (known by their home grown technology for bid management) and Media Agencies (who treated Search like a Radio or TV buy). RM chose to walk the line between these spectrums and invested in creating knowledgeable strategists who knew how to use industry leading (3rd party) technology as well as plan, test, and optimize media buys based on performance.

4. Improved relevancy is the goal of all optimizations. SEO techniques are now used daily in Paid Search. PPC optimization used to be about bid management, then CTR became all the rage. The definition of “optimization” is now about improving Quality Scores which are the opaque, engine-created metrics that drive more traffic, acheive higher rankings, and lower CPCs. It’s not so opaque, btw.

5. Search is for more than just Ecommerce. We knew the big dollars were in the non direct response advertising, but the early adopters of Search were the dot com storefronts. There was/is no better place to learn the fundamentals of PPC & SEO, but the industry is finally starting to see more brand advertisers enter the market, thanks to research and common sense.

6. Search must integrate or rot in a silo. It’s a main reason we joined the Omnicom family. Search is a subset of Online Marketing which is becoming a subset of Digital Marketing (hello mobile!) which is obviously part of the much bigger advertising/marketing umbrella. How many disconnected agencies does it take to screw up your marketing message? A-Rod is a supurb individual ball player, but he's not going to win the series without a strong team that works together. Phelps? No Gold in the 4x100 without Lezak closing.

Who is bringing the champagne on Tuesday? Congrats Resolution Media, we couldn’t have done this without our brilliant employees or our loyal clients.