Waiting to Rule the Ad World: The Next Decade Will Shift to Search

With apologies to BTO, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.” Over
the next decade we’ll see Search explode unlike any media we have ever seen
before. Dollar for dollar, in one form or another, sometime before the end of
the coming decade, Search will become the most important and valuable media
channel in the world.

Search makes up about 15% of the total US advertising spend.
Globally it’s even less.  And while
the advertising industry continues to shrink (another 15% YoY in H1 2009) the Internet has not been affected. When and if dollars come back it’s hard
to imagine this is not where they go.

The efficiency of Search is what will continue to drive
dollars into it. No one knows the timing of our needs more than us. Search is
the utility of the web, the way we use it – even within applications like email
or sites like YouTube. It continues to get more personalized, more intelligent
and more relevant.

In a medium where user experience is EVERYTHING, it is our
control OVER the medium that provides the best user experience possible. This
feedback loop also provides the richest data. Think for a second how
smart these relevancy algorithms have been even in the early incarnations of search advertising that we are experiencing now. 

It doesn’t hurt Search’s growth that Google is becoming the
Internet. But this is an effect, not a cause of the growth – and there is no end in sight. Local
advertising dollars have not even touched search. Direct mail (already data
driven) is expected to decline 39% in the next five years – from $49.7 billion in annual spend in 2008 to $29.8
billion and will shift to search. Radio dollars (half
local, half national) have not even moved into Search en masse. Then there are
the remaining dollars from Newspapers. Looked at a circular lately? Mobile
search also has billions more in untapped potential. All these dollars hit search in the coming decade.

Social Media will not eclipse Search as a medium. While
important to us for communications it is less important to helping solve
problems where the solution has material value. There is no doubt Social Media
will continue to become a larger part of our lives as more of our communications
take place on the web. Still, it is hard to argue SM will get bigger than the
other major communication channel of the web and the other largest consumer of Internet
users time, Email. *

Also, as is becoming clearer to the masses, Social Media involves user programming. This requirement is a
personal investment people have never made with media before. What is the trade-off? How can we expect
to maintain privacy on a web that asks unsophisticated users to manage settings,
feeds, alerts and multitudes of preferences all of which are designed to push advertising on them that they don’t want and didn't ask for? And so the analogy with Email continues…

I’m sure there will be plenty of very smart people that will
disagree with me and I’m sure I’ve ticked off a few of my friends and favorite
people in our business. They all have vital interests in media channels outside
of search, as do I. I take nothing
away from these channels. We are all viable media that will grow and get better
for people & advertisers.

Yet, for some reason I’ve never understood, ever since the
rise of Search to critical mass people have been waiting to kill it. Google
killers and countless thought pieces on what channel will replace it or take
its market share. What’s less realized is that Search has enabled a fundamental
shift. This kind of market timing has never been possible to advertisers before. More important, in the ever time-fractured, 24/7 connected, media onslaught world we live in, this kind of pull only gets MORE
valuable. Couple with this more and more digital objects getting thrown into
the vast sea called the web and Search will undoubtedly continue to be our primary mode of web navigation.

Search a decade from now will be very different than today.
One thing that will also be different will be its place in the Media world. As
all Media becomes Digital Media, Search will become the world’s dominant
advertising medium. But the biggest winner will be you. Happy New Decade!

* Interestingly email and display are roughly about the same
market size, $15 billionish. Seems to me that Social Media fits well into that size too. Still I predict by 2015 Search will be bigger than Display, Email & Social Media combined.

** No one will beat Google for combating
spam.

Very similar thoughts from last year's "year-end" piece: 

2008: The Year Search Won by a Knockout