Mathematicians better suited to search than creatives
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Search marketing has rapidly evolved into a $22bn (£11bn) global market. It's incredibly fast moving and extraordinarily complex. In an attempt to optimise bid positions, many agencies have huge teams of people, both on- and offshore, using spreadsheets and pivot tables to manually analyse keyword positions. This is a very tedious job - it's time-consuming, boring, complicated and very easy to get wrong. So it's little surprise that these organisations are enduring record levels of staff churn.
While search is a highly effective marketing tool, this is hardly the place to explore or exploit traditional creative skills. For those individuals with marketing or media degrees, complex analysis is hardly a core competency. Such people should be utilising their skills on writing copy, designing landing pages or expanding keyword lists; in reality they would be far better placed in traditional marketing roles.
Indeed, even these functions are highly repetitive within the pay-per-click arena. Consumer online behaviour is extremely hard to predict and it's rare to get it right the first time.
It's a harsh fact for marketers, but understanding the data is far more important than any creative talent in search marketing. To operate successfully within the opaque markets operated by Google AdWords, Yahoo! and MSN, a marketing agency needs to model accurately the maximum cost-per-click (CPC), the effective bid position and, critically, the resultant revenues. Such skills are unlikely to have been nurtured on a marketing or media degree yet are the core competency of any mathematician or operational research specialist.
Search marketing is now a highly complex environment, demanding sophisticated bid management algorithms akin to those used within financial markets. By automating the bid management function, agencies can drive up results and, critically, free the time and resources to drive additional value from pay-per-click.
But this additional value comes from in-depth analysis of keywords, real-time comparison of ad success and the creation of highly accurate forecasts - tasks that require significant numerical skill and ingenuity. Again, hardly the role for a creative talent.
Of course, there is some creativity within an online campaign, but this is far removed from that required within traditional media. Yes the quality of the ad is important due to the need for a good Google ratings score and, of course, brand equity. But, in fact, this process can be reduced to a mathematical task.
It's important to place emphasis on the design and messaging of an ad. However, any agency with an over-reliance on creative skills has missed the fundamental shift in activity: this is a highly volatile market that requires people who can drive efficiencies at every level of the creative and media-buying process. And those people are numerical experts, not creatives.
Search marketing is now so complex it's akin to the financial markets and, as a result, its experts are market analysts, not marketers. It's the mathematical experts who will create the highly complex pay-per-click campaigns that are required to deliver incremental value.
David White is head of European operations at search agency Efficient Frontier
