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)

The Economist has a quick, solid piece covering the increasing fortunes of the old-school US commercial airline business. In short, the US$35 *billion* they have lost over the past five years (yes, you read that right) seems to have finally, possibly, just maybe, driven them to gain a closer to competitive and cost-based footing with the upstart and low-cost carriers.It also mentions JetBlue's recent challenges, including a loss making Q3 and resulting equipment sales, which I had not been aware of.

Always fun in the airline business, isn't it? I can only imagine how challenging it must be for third-party guys like ExpediOrbiLocity and others to be earning any appreciable compensation from those carriers these days, given the carriers' improving fortunes, search and metasearch (more on that in a future post - lots of action in that world), fenced inventory and CRS changes moving more power and money into their camp.

It might still be the milk at the back of the store and responsible for driving a lot of cross-sellable traffic, but increasingly the third party guys have to be looking at the air category itself in terms of revenue from booking fees and very little else. Everybody knew it was coming - it now must be close to here.

 

Awesome night. The Embassy says there were more than 90 here and I'd believe it, easy.

A real pleasure. Thanks to all who came.

(Posted via blackberry)

In stark contrast to last week's IAB broadcast panel, I was at a session about online video put on by Akamai this morning, where the panel was super.

There were three people, one from CanWest, one from CHUM and one from the Sympatico side of the Sympatico-msn tie up (I will add their names when I'm online next) and they actually seemed to understand this stuff. Thoughtful, smart commentary, with real live experiences and a pretty dialled-in view on the subject matter.

Maybe this is the difference between having the people actually *doing* the stuff talking vs. their leadership? Hard to say, and it is hard for senior business leaders to go as deep on a specific topic as these people did.

But, it bodes well for future innovation and development once these types of people get more of a say.

The rest of the morning was good, too, with a Forrester guy sharing video numbers and trends. It would have been nice to have some (any) Canadian stats, but in any event the direction is clear.

Nice work and thanks Akamai for the invite.

PS: mesh meetup tonight at the Irish Embassy, 6pm. Hope to see you there.

(Posted via blackberry)

Oh my sweet goodness, this is the funniest - because it is so true - thing I have read about business in a long, long while.

Thank you Joel!

 

As Rob Hyndman and Austin Hill mentioned yesterday, they, together with David Crow and myself are spinning up StartUp Camp here in Toronto. The concept is to apply the unconference concept to the business side of the startup world, as the StartUp Camp folks in the US have done so successfully.

It's all TBD at this point, but the place to keep tabs on developments is the wiki. If you have startup aspirations, plan to be a part of it.

Also, a reminder that the mesh meetup goes off next Wednesday, November 15th, at the Irish Embassy pub in Toronto. Let's us know you are coming via the event page on Upcoming and plan to be there for a general mix and mingle starting at around 6pm.

The Embassy is located at the northeast corner of Yonge and Wellington, in downtown Toronto. Google map here.

Hope to see you there next week.

Tags: mesh07, startup camp

For the first time that I've noticed it anyway, I've had a video ad for Dove show up on my blog today. Depending on where you are, you may or may not see it (it's showing up in that AdSense box below the mesh ad, over in the C column on the right). Fascinating to see the growth of Google's move into display and video ads really start to ramp. A taste of things to come, I'd say.

(posted by blackberry)

 

I spoke last week at the IAB Conference, together with Steve Rubel on the topic of Web 2.0, Social Media etc. That was fun, and I was happy to help Jordan and the IAB out of a bind when Jordan had to pull out last minute.

But *man* was being there a blast back to 2002.

Our slot was immediately following a panel of broadcasters, who were represented at this event for the first time ever. Usual suspects, head Senior Execs of this and that network, da da da. Holy snappin' are those kids out of touch.

Listening to them sit there and say that nothing seemed likely to change etc. reminded me of being at travel industry conferences around 2000 when the great leaders of that world would sit there and tell each other pretty much the same thing, while I stared at my hands. You know, the whole "nothing is happening online" chestnut. In fact, I often think of the vice-chairman of a large travel industry supplier who all but laughed at me when I suggested that they might want to think about doing something serious online. He was happy with his offline channel partners, thank you very much.

I bet you can imagine how that turned out. Not exceptionally well. And he's not there anymore.

Go figure.

The fact is that in very short order the world of video is going to be turned upside down, the surrounding economic conventional wisdom is going to be seriously challenged and the "shotgun" ad model is going to be under enormous pressure.

Those broadcast kids seem violently ill prepared.

(Posted via blackberry)

I got a last-minute call last night to sub for my friend Jordan Banks who runs eBay Canada in the Web 2.0 slot at today's IAB Conference in Toronto. This is the Internet Advertising Bureau's big annual event, and I will be on stage with Steve Rubel, talking about social media and it's impact on Canadian business.

If you are at the event, please be sure to say hello.