Chrome represents the start of the new browser wars

A version of this piece was published in Marketing in 2008


The only billionaire I know collects earthmoving equipment. A visit to his house could well involve digging huge holes in the grounds, or filling them in – for him it’s a contemplative process, and a chance to indulge the engineer in him.

I couldn’t help thinking of him when I read Google’s latest announcement – the launch of their own web browser. Google Chrome will compete in what’s beginning to look once more like an interesting market.

The earliest popular web browser was Netscape’s Mosaic, which burst on to the scene in 1994. Within a year, Microsoft had launched Internet Explorer 1.0 which it distributed for free, and the first browser war was under way. By 1997 it was all over and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer began its domination of the sector – leveraging the software giant’s huge distribution strength.

And it’s not until recently that anyone’s been able to challenge this.

Two things have changed since 1997 that have made this possible. The emergence of the open source software movement (where communities of developers cooperate to create software for the common good) challenged the supremacy of big software companies.

Linux in operating systems. Apache in web servers, MySQL in databases, PHP in web programming – these open source projects now dominate the web’s architecture, changing the business model fundamentally for giants like Microsoft, Sun, and IBM. But it isn’t just software for IT people – this has impacted on consumers too, as the not-for-profit Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox browser has reached 20% market share.

According to NetApplications.com, Internet Explorer has fallen from 80% to 72% in the last 18 months, with almost all of this going to Firefox.

And if you install the Firefox browser on your computer, you’ll see a clue to what else has changed. Because integrated into the toolbar in Firefox is a search panel, which provides listings from Google.

Almost all of Mozilla’s income derives from this search panel – their deal with Google helped them earn $61m in 2006 (the last published accounts), since when their market share has rocketed.

Google know that loyalty to their brand is low. Web users will use what’s to hand – it’s why distribution is critical to the search giant’s success, and it’s why Microsoft’s first move as they launched into battle with Google for the search market was to build Windows Live search into Internet Explorer.

The official Google blog is pretty lukewarm about the new browser – “The web gets better with more options and innovations – Chrome is another option”. Hardly a ringing endorsement.

But one thing Chrome does do is tell Google what people are looking at – reporting back your surfing behaviour. It will add more suction to the data hoover that is Google and that may unsettle some.

But the real point of Chrome is a bigger one. The browser is the window not just onto the web, but on to all of the applications that reside there, from online storage (YoStore) to photo-sharing (flickr), word processing, spreadsheets (Google Docs). In the future, it’s believed, most computing power will reside online – accessed through a browser with little stored locally on our computers.

So browsers are a critical battleground for control of access to the future of computing and the internet, and Chrome’s features are designed to target this.

So whilst there’s little on the face of it that consumers can’t currently get from IE or Firefox, Chrome represents a more fundamental shift in direction. And because it’s open source, the development resource going into Chrome will boost progress of Firefox too.

Google are wealthy, and have a history of launching dozens of software plays and little history of making money out of them. But Chrome isn’t just a rich man’s hobby. It’s a sign that massive change is on the way for how we use the internet – a change that’s set to come at Microsoft’s cost.

It'll take more than good search to beat Google

A version of this piece was published in Marketing in 2008



The story of David and Goliath has attracted people over the generations, for its tale of hope for the small guy, for triumph in adversity, overcoming the odds. Hannibal, the Cartheginian commander, is remembered not just for that terrible film with Oliver Reed, but amongst military tacticians for his victory at Cannae where he destroyed a Roman army which massively outnumbered him.

This celebration of the underdog reflects our need for heroes, but also our desire to control and check the powerful.

So the launch last week of Cuil (pronounced ‘cool’) a new search engine from some ex-Google staff is interesting not just because of what it is, but what it says about the incumbent.

What it is, is impressive. Cuil claims to index three times as many sites as Google, using an algorithm that looks not at popularity (the number and quality of links pointing to a site) but at context – examining the context in which the searcher’s keywords sit in a page in order to understand better the relevance to a search.

If you look at search in purely rational terms, the user is only looking in reality for one result, not thousands. But Google’s claim to index billions of pages, and then its practice of presenting thousands of them to the searcher, give the illusion of breadth and choice – regardless of whether they find the thing they’re looking for. This is a powerful proposition, and it’s one the Cuil clearly have in mind when they promote themselves as listing three times as many pages as Google.

There’s another noteworthy feature of Cuil – their attitude to privacy. Coming hot on the heels with Google’s experience with a US court demanding they hand over all the viewing data for every user on YouTube, privacy is a weak spot in Google’s armour. Google hang on to the search data of every user for eighteen months – a fact that unsettles privacy campaigners, particularly after AOL’s disastrous public release of thousands of searchers’ data two years ago.

Cuil keeps no data from its users’ searches, and it makes a point of this. They keep no log files, IP addresses or personally identifiable information – as they put it, “Your search history is your business, not ours”.

The search results themselves seem promising – an interesting and different layout to Google’s, with three columns of text and pictures. A sliding box to the right allows the searcher to drill into different categories – so a search for Orange brings up the mobile phone company as first listing, but categories allow you to focus your search into Orange County, California, Orange Sodas or Citrus fruit.

This is smart and useful, because the engine is making a reasonable fist of differentiating between fruit and phones – for which it needs to understand context. It doesn’t always get this right – Sky TV comes first in the listings for a search for ‘sky’, but there’s a Virgin Media logo next to the listing.

So Cuil’s interface is a useful improvement on Google’s. But good search and a useful interface isn’t enough.

A quick look at Google’s Q2 results (which despite disappointment in the markets were still 39% up on the previous year) shows that 31% of their revenues come from partner sites – other websites which carry the Google search box.

Distribution is the key to Google’s massive success – most sites take Google’s AdSense program, and Google pay big money to them; $1.47billion out of the $1.66bn they earned that quarter.

So Google’s success in gaining distribution is down to two key things. The monetisation they drive from each search is better than their competitors, and their ability to model and predict this is better – so they can cut better deals for distribution partners, with stronger guarantees.

This is the barrier to entry for Cuil. It isn’t just the quality of their product – it’s their ability to drive distribution that will determine ultimate success. So Cuil is an interesting launch, but the chances of it launching that single stone that strikes the giant between the eyes are pretty slim.

Strategy and the short term

A version of this piece was published in Marketing in 2008


Last week’s Bellwether report, the IPA’s quarterly survey of marketing budgets, makes pretty depressing reading, with “the rate of decline gathering to a pace not seen since budgets were hit in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks”.

As you will have grown used to by now, internet advertising was the only sector to show growth, with search still showing stronger increases than display.

The Bellwether report is so-called because advertising expenditure has been demonstrated to be a leading indicator of economic performance. Because marketing budgets are easy to alter in the short term, unlike other longer term investments (plant, machinery, property) they are vulnerable to being plundered to make up shortfalls in profitability in the wider business.

In some senses this is a logical tactic to adopt – if corporate performance is affected, the share price could slip, and all sorts of unpleasant consequences ensue.

In Jean-Claude Larreche’s book ‘The Momentum Effect’ he divides strategies into two types – momentum and compensatory. Momentum strategies require the organisation to be pulling in one direction. These are powerful and effective, but require a singular determination to align an organisation around the achievement of a single goal.

Compensatory strategy describes a scenario where actions are taken to make up for shortfalls elsewhere in the organisation, rather than to achieve the goals of the business. Sometimes this is legitimate, he argues, because we have to live in the real world. So a manager with a target to make may ‘pull forward’ business from the following year to meet it. He’s going to have to make it up later, but if he doesn’t do this, he may not be in the game later anyway.

The problem occurs when compensatory strategy becomes the dominant type of strategy within an organisation – a company devotes so much energy to maintaining equilibrium that it fails to move forward.

And this is what we see when marketing budgets are cut in tough economic times. It’s of course true that if you see marketing as a cost, you shouldn’t be doing it at all. It should be an investment – and if it pays back, then you should be doing it regardless of the economic climate, both to maintain sales and the health of the brand.

But this is a lot to ask when the share price is already under pressure, so it’s an obvious short-term compensatory strategy to shave marketing budgets even though the negative effects of this might be known, and we’re seeing the impact of this right now on the Bellwether report.


But as we’ve seen, internet advertising – and particularly search – is still making gains.

Internet advertising is often more cost-effective and accountable. This makes it inherently less risky than other forms of media – and in uncertain times it’s not surprising that people are attracted to anything they perceive as more reliable.

And search is (on the face of it) less risky still. Its cost-per-click basis means people regard this as a transfer of business risk away from the advertiser and to the media owner. This risk-transfer has driven the stratospheric growth curve of search, but it is a simplistic model.

Because whilst it’s a hugely valuable marketing tool, search doesn’t create demand. It fulfils it.

So advertisers are right to continue to invest in search during a downturn – after all, it’s more important than ever to be catching every customer. But search depends on other activity to stimulate demand over and above latent levels, and it is this that will be lost as investment slips in other areas.

So if businesses are drawn to spend more on search because of its lower perceived risk, they may find themselves spending still more on this activity to compensate for slower demand.

What might have been a short-term compensation strategy to maintain corporate performance, could become an eroder of efficiency and an inflater of costs – at exactly the time when better performance couldn’t be more important.

The death of the campaign

A version of this piece was published in Marketing in 2008
  On March 21st 1918, Erich Luderndorff launched the Spring Offensive, the massive attack that was Germany’s bid to end the First World War. In just five hours, the Germans fired over one million shells, and lightly-equipped stormtroopers cut deep swathes into British lines.

But the very speed with which the Germans advanced proved to be their undoing, as they outran their supply lines and ended up eating the very horses on which their progress depended.

Pace is everything, and a firm but flexible plan for how to deploy resources over a period of time to achieve a goal is vital. Using different assets to support each other (as Luderndorff failed to do) was as important then as it is to today’s marketer as a campaign develops.

The need to achieve cut-through from the cluttered media environment leads marketers to concentrate their resources – to focus them on a target group or time of year where their message is most likely to resonate – and accept that at other times of year and to other people, their message will remain unseen.

The production cost of TV advertising adds fuel to this, with the belief that individual executions ‘wear out’ means they have a finite shelf-life.

So the concept of a campaign is almost hard-wired in to the advertiser’s worldview. We gather our resources, make an assault on the consumer, then retreat, count our costs and regroup before having another go. After all, the advertising trade mag is even called Campaign.

But digital is challenging this approach.

The first place this was felt was search. Volumes of queries ebb and flow, driven by seasonality and publicity, but underlying demand is constant. But even though the number of people searching for ‘swimming pool’ might be lower in autumn than in spring, a pool company would still want to pick up these leads. Early activity in search followed the traditional ‘campaign’ format, but practitioners quickly realised that this was preventing them meeting existing demand from consumers – a missed opportunity.

So search tends now to be budgeted for from the bottom up. Rather than setting an amount to spend on marketing in a year, then dividing it up until an amount is reached for each medium, search volumes are modelled through the year, and the required investment set aside to meet this (allowing for extra demand created when TV activity is run).

Similarly, affiliate marketing doesn’t suit a campaign approach. Continuous activity is needed to build relationships with affiliates, and to reflect their outlay behind your brand – whilst they appreciate the impact of campaign-based activity on their own sales, they find it hard to build transaction volumes without investment over time.

But it’s the rise of Web 2.0 that has provided the most recent challenge to the campaign way of thinking.

Thousands of widgets have been created, alongside chatrooms, forums and even entire branded social networks. Of course if the venture is unsuccessful, its owners will risk little by shutting it down. But in all of these instances, marketers have stepped out of campaign-centred thinking and created entities that are long-term.

In many cases consumers have been asked to contribute their time and creativity to participating in the project. They have introduced their friends, created avatars, uploaded photos. They’ve made playlists, scrapbooks and chipped in with their own recipes, hints and tips – which means of course, that they can’t be turned off when marketing decides to move on, without creating inconvenience and resentment from users – turning a positive brand experience into a negative.

So whilst marketers have in the past taken much of their terminology and thinking from the military, perhaps now it’s time to move on. The campaign approach never really reflected how consumers behave, only the constraints of operationalising marketing in traditional media. Digital changes this – and the consequence of this change could be the death of the campaign.

SEO: make your own luck...

A version of this piece was published in Marketing in 2008


Richard Wiseman at the University of Hertfordshire has spent eight years looking at what makes people lucky. We’re not talking rabbits’ feet and avoiding ladders here – he’s devised four principles that determine a person’s likelihood of success.

Some of the veer a little towards the obvious; ‘Maximise your chances of something good happening by creating, noticing and acting on opportunities’ he says – which seems a little like saying you can avoid the misfortune of sinking, by swimming.

But at least we now know that we really do make our own luck. And nowhere is this more true than in natural search.

Search marketing has become a huge business in the UK. We’re Google’s second biggest market, and search alone will represent just under 10% of all UK advertising this year. This might seem big, but the real search market is five times that size.

Because 80% of traffic comes from the natural results – in Google, the listings below and to the left of the paid-for ones.

And these ‘natural’ or ‘organic’ listings can’t be bought. Instead, your position in the rankings is determined by the relevance that the search engine’s algorithm judges your site to have.

So with such a huge volume of traffic to play for, you’d think it’d attract a lot of attention from marketers.

But search engine optimisation (SEO) – the way of manipulating sites to improve their ranking – is fraught with difficulty. Traditionally the unaccountable face of search, it’s gained a reputation for impenetrable jargon (even for digital media) and unethical practice, and many sites don’t realise the influence they can have on their ranking.

Often, marketers simply aren’t aware that SEO is needed, thinking it comes ‘in the box’ when they buy their website. But the skills and preoccupations of web designers are very different to those of SEOs –concerned with design, copy, usability etc., whilst SEOs focus on metadata, tags, redirects and links, and their super-niche skills change constantly to reflect the hyperevolution of search.

In other words, websites are usually designed for people, and many ignore that other vital audience, the spiders that index sites for search engines.

These spiders see websites very differently. Animation and images are often invisible to them, they need clues to help them understand site structure and if you’re not careful they can easily misinterpret your efforts.

Take the 301 Redirect. Lots of sites have both the .co.uk and the .com web address, but only one site – you type in one and get redirected to the other. Google’s spider looks at this, and assumes you’ve got two sites with the same content – a common technique for trying to fool the search engine into ranking you higher. So Google’s algorithm will penalise your site for this – pushing you down the ranking.


The solution is simple. The redirect needs to be a particular type – a 301 Redirect. Doing this makes no difference to users, but tells Google you’ve only got one site – meaning you don’t get penalised.

There are hundreds of techniques like this, and properly implementing them can impact hugely not just on the volume of traffic you can get from search, but on the quality of your listing – one advertiser went from 500 to 23,000 referrals a month on one keyword alone, just by implementing a proper SEO programme.

But nowadays, effective SEO also impacts on paid-for search. Google takes the quality of your landing page into account when determining your ranking in paid search, adjusting the minimum bid downwards if it deems site quality to be high. So a poorly-optimised site might have a minimum bid of 15p, whilst a well optimised site could be 10p – meaning an SEO programme could pay for itself just in savings on paid-for search.

With this much value at stake, we can’t afford to let search happen to us. It’s time for sites to throw out the rabbits’ feet and start making their own luck.

Coveting your neighbour's brand terms...

A version of this piece was published in Marketing in 2008


Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s ox.

Any Israelite who happenened to have a neighbour with an attractive ox was probably beginning to think he’d got away with it, until Moses said “and tenthly”. Still, everybody was probably relieved to have that whole ox-coveting thing cleared up as it probably caused more than a little strife, what with the lack of non-bovine consumer durables which might have provided alternatives to covet at the time.

Whatever else we might have got up to, coveting was definitely off.


And so it was until this month with Google too.

There we were all eying up our competitors’ brand names, but not allowed to do anything about it by the search engine. For some years now, Google enabled companies to protect their trademarks by preventing bidding by competitors – so Tesco couldn’t bid for Sainsbury’s.

Last week though, the search giant announced a change of plan. From May, the UK will follow the US, in allowing a free-for-all. Now, advertisers can get on with some serious coveting.

All this attention from your competitors could significantly impact on your search programme’s effectiveness, so you need to start work now to make sure you don’t lose out. Fortunately, there are three key things you can do to come out on top under the new commandment – and even better, I’m going to tell you what they are.

Content. Boosting the quality score of your landing page can directly impact on the amount you might have to bid for your brand term, because the Google algorithm rewards relevance. An effective SEO programme will boost your ‘natural immunity’ from competitors, meaning that you can retain top position in the paid-for rankings even with a lower bid for your brand term than your opponent.

Integration. Most affiliates generate traffic to their sites by using paid search, and unchecked they can drive up your bids on Google. Many advertisers fail properly to manage affiliates’ search activity, and some ban affiliates from bidding on their brand terms in the mistaken belief that this will control costs. In fact, properly controlled, affiliates can help a brand to block out the competition – outperforming competitors and pushing them down the rankings. Integrated search and affiliate management is the only way to achieve this – managing these in silos is only going to benefit your competition.

Data. Most advertisers attribute 100% of the sale to the last step in the process - more often than not, search. But most consumers make more than one search, mixing generic searches (“dresses”) with brand searches (“Next”) and branded product (“Next dresses”), and data-smart advertisers have responded by investing in clickstream analysis – understanding the value of keywords not just in creating a sale, but in pushing the consumer down the acquisition path towards a later sale.

Without this data-based model, both volume and cost-effectiveness are limited – and since bidding on competitors’ brand terms may be costly at face value, a more sophisticated model is necessary to justify the value of activity beyond simply annoying rivals (although this is fun too).

Google might be poor at relationships, but they’re very good at sums. They’ve got a huge test market for this approach in the US and Canada, where they’ve been allowing competitive bidding for four years – so I think we can be certain it’s going to generate increased revenues for Google, which means of course it’s going to cost marketers more.

The problem for most search advertisers is they don’t have a strategy.

A detailed focus on bid management, keyword groups and optimisation is important, but at a time of fundamental shift it’s those who have a big picture who will thrive. As Google moves the goalposts once again, the three core strategic pillars of content, integration and data will be essential components of that picture – and the critical success factors that will distinguish those who prosper, from those who merely covet.

Is search advertising?

A version of this piece was published in Marketing in 2008


In 1928, universities in the USA announced that continental drift was impossible, and banned the teaching of it – a ban that largely remained in place until the theory of Plate Tectonics was published in the sixties.

It’s not unusual for the old to struggle with the new. But perhaps we should be more surprised when the old struggle with the established.

It’s been ten years since Google launched, and five years since they started charging for search. Since then there’s been an explosion in search marketing, and it’s become a vital weapon in the marketer’s armoury – making Google one of the biggest media companies in the world.

So if search isn’t new, we’re hearing some remarkable thinking about it from the traditional media world.

I was at the WARC research conference a couple of weeks ago, and was struck when one of the speakers opined that he “wasn’t sure that search was really advertising – it’s really just distribution.”

Nobody picked him up on it, and clearly smoking the same meme, M&C Saatchi chairman Moray MacLennan at the FT Digital Media Conference a couple of days later picked up on the same theme:

“When you’re putting money into search you’re taking it out of marketing,” he said. “All you’re doing is buying a space on the internet high street. You’re commoditising your brand.”

So are they right? Is search ‘advertising’ or ‘marketing’ at all? Is it just distribution?

Let’s for a moment assume that MacLennan’s right – search is just buying space on the internet high street. If he means that it’s a part of distribution, then that would certainly make it part of McCarthy’s four P’s of marketing. If he means that it’s part of what many marketers call ‘the last six feet’, then to dismiss it as commoditisation of the brand is to similarly exclude in-store merchandising.

And are you commoditising your brand by using search? A commodity has no differentiating characteristics, and is bought on price only – so is search leading brands this way?

In reality, that’s up to us. If we choose as marketers to throw up our hands in resignation at this challenge, then the brands we nurture will probably wither – either becoming commoditised, or more likely, beaten into submission by those who rise to the challenge.

Because consumers make brand choices in search.

This isn’t speculation – it’s empirically demonstrated by the data. Search engine users don’t just make one search before a purchase – they typically make several. We can track this behaviour, and understand how the process works as they progress – “flat screen TV”, “Sony TV”, “Bravia”, and often the model number. We can see where they were diverted to competitors, and where competitors lost them to us – and most importantly we can influence this with the copy we use in the listing (and A/B test that copy to refine its effectiveness).

If we say the right things, and do so in the right places, we can work to protect and even build our brand premium.

This is marketing alright, and moreover, it’s advertising – in a pure, analytical and rather detail-obsessive way. To master it truly, we must understand how it creates value in the marketing and media mix – where and how it influences users on their journey to being customers (either of ours or of the competition). And we’re not going to get there if we dismiss it.

I suspect MacLennan was being deliberately provocative. But what he said plays to the prejudices of the luddite faction, and is on the lips of many in what for want of a better term might be referred to as ‘traditional’ advertising. For these increasingly beleaguered folk, these new forms of advertising/marketing are sparking a semantic debate – rather than a determined attempt to master new techniques that bring real value to marketers.

For these folk, the barbarians really are at the gate – and they’re using Google to get in.