"Search isn't sexy," claimed one Yahoo! exec at a recent Panama launch event. Poor guy. He must be working in paid search, like me. Because he's flat wrong to say search in general isn't sexy.
Thinking in terms of myths and tales suitable to audiences of all ages, it's clear that search marketing tells a fantastic, ever-shifting story. It helps some drop off to sleep at night. Others lie awake, quivering in their beds. Search is a realm full of gargantuan spiders and powerful robots; cloaking; and hurricane-like events with nicknames. There are black hats and white. A purgatory place called the "sandbox."
Favorite recurring characters (some with Wikipedia entries!) like Danny, Matt, Marissa, and Vanessa. Some popular creators of the tales are well known, too: Jerry and David; Larry and Sergey. Some characters have evil nicknames. And the universe is controlled by a looming benign force of evil, from a centralized base of operations, usually a large, curvaceous low-rise facility (disingenuously called a "campus,") filled with candy, table games, and furniture and/or spheroids resplendent in primary colors or purple.
By contrast, paid search's cast of characters has names like Nick, Salar, Andrew, Kevin, Mona, Shuman, Sheryl, Zod, John, and John. Only a couple have stubs in Wikipedia. Most use their real names.
So it's paid search, as opposed to organic search optimization, that suffers from a lack of identity, primarily because organic search optimization, as the incumbent in the space, has done a great job of inventing a mythology for itself. Paid search, maybe in a misguided attempt to be respectable, or maybe just because the power of incumbency is difficult to overcome, has told a much duller story.
“Search isn’t sexy,” claimed one Yahoo! exec at a recent Panama launch event. Poor guy. He must be working in paid search, like me. Because he’s flat wrong to say search in general isn’t sexy.
Thinking in terms of myths and tales suitable to audiences of all ages, it’s clear that search marketing tells a fantastic, ever-shifting story. It helps some drop off to sleep at night. Others lie awake, quivering in their beds. Search is a realm full of gargantuan spiders and powerful robots; cloaking; and hurricane-like events with nicknames. There are black hats and white. A purgatory place called the “sandbox.”
Favorite recurring characters (some with Wikipedia entries!) like Danny, Matt, Marissa, and Vanessa. Some popular creators of the tales are well known, too: Jerry and David; Larry and Sergey. Some characters have evil nicknames. And the universe is controlled by a looming benign force of evil, from a centralized base of operations, usually a large, curvaceous low-rise facility (disingenuously called a “campus,”) filled with candy, table games, and furniture and/or spheroids resplendent in primary colors or purple.
By contrast, paid search’s cast of characters has names like Nick, Salar, Andrew, Kevin, Mona, Shuman, Sheryl, Zod, John, and John. Only a couple have stubs in Wikipedia. Most use their real names.
So it’s paid search, as opposed to organic search optimization, that suffers from a lack of identity, primarily because organic search optimization, as the incumbent in the space, has done a great job of inventing a mythology for itself. Paid search, maybe in a misguided attempt to be respectable, or maybe just because the power of incumbency is difficult to overcome, has told a much duller story.
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