- 9:00 – 10:00 am Registration & Continental Breakfast
- 10:00 – 10:15 am Welcome & Introduction
- 10:15 am – 12:00 pm Progress in Research and Ads
- 12:45 – 2:00 pm Opportunities Today
- 2:00 – 2:45 pm Future Directions
- 2:45 – 3:45 pm Q&A – Eric Schmidt and Sergey Brin
- 3:45 – 4:30 pm Product Demos
Update: An interesting web-cast “slide” showing Google’s 70-20-10 approach, and the recent product line launches & enhancements. (Quality isn’t great.)
Update 2: The Dir of PM for AdWords is now speaking, and shows a slide with the relative cost per lead for various advertising methods. (Later: Henrik Torstenssons drops in and comments about the validity of this comparison. Henrik, no argument here, I’m in relay mode, and they didn’t talk at all about Piper Jaffrey’s methodology… I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt, which might not be smart.)
Talking about the AdWords API, he mentions the ability to programmatically allow ‘retail advertisers to adjust ad spend against inventory levels’, a meme I started over two years ago when I was leading the development of Overture’s Adveriser Web Services/DTC-XML biz & product strategy. Let’s hope there’s some original thinking pending later in the show. (Sorry to be snarky on this, I just hate that Yahoo has done so little to evangelize this stuff that Google is once again going to be able to co-opt their thought leadership. Frustrating.)
Update 3: Showing some openness, Google shared some info on its agency and vertical (i.e., category) advertiser consultative sales approach (smart, as they’ve been criticized as of late for being antagonistic). Yahoo does something similar, though it’s not clear that it’s as robustly developed:
Update 4: Want to know where those stellar financial returns are coming from (beyond distribution deals, growing search volume, etc)? How about a claim of algo changes that have improved CTR by 40%. Yikes.
Update 5: Google reveals how Adsense for Feeds will be integrated with Blogger; basically, users will need to past the ad HTML code into the post Footer page (after setting up an account in AdWords/AdSense, shown below).
Update 6: Looking for info on “MyGoogle”, “iGoogle”, or “Fusion” (naming really unclear right now? Check out my early cut, Google Launches MyGoogle.
Comparing avarage acquisition cost per direct marketing channel is likely to lead to bad analysis. It is helpful to compare acquisition costs for different channels per category. My feeling, without having had a thorough look at the data, is that the click price in categories that use direct mail at a $9.94 acquisition cost is not 45 cents. And then we have not talked about what qualifies as a lead.