Traditional Agencies... Jealous Of Search Marketers.

Was reading a clip from Search Insider this morning. It was a piece giving those of us not lucky enough to attend SES NYC this week a report on what has happened so far.

One of the blurbs listed was the following:

In-house - A lot of the information in this panel applied not just to in-house SEM managers, but to agencies and independents as well. Bill Hunt, CEO of Global Strategies International, talked a lot about the imperative to build business cases for search, even if it required "using crayons" to make stakeholders and executives understand. ...

Hunt also said that trust has been a major factor in corporate search success, and the marketing executives that he has worked with rely on their traditional agencies to lay out what is important in overall marketing strategy. So if the traditional agency isn't touting the importance of search, for whatever the reason, it's off the radar in the enterprise scenario, making the agency -- and in-house SEM job and campaign -- much less effective.

I don't think it's just traditional agencies that do this though. Until late last year, the agency I worked at (which was an Interactive agency) constantly undermined search. A client would come is looking to spend $10 million, and the biggest piece of that would go towards the Online Media team that bought non-search ad space.

This was very frustrating. Not only was search the most profitable in terms of return for the client, but it was the most profitable team at the agency. (SEO in particular. Very few purchased tools are needed to SEO. Sometimes none at all. This is where it's all about how intelligent you are. Not about your tools.)

Eventually, but not soon enough for my taste, this Interactive agency slowly began to "get it." Search is critical to your advertising efforts. This agency now has a search team that is a respectable size, with multiple levels of experience running it. And that is how it should be.

I'm surprised by how often I hear/read about search not being a major component to a company's online efforts. There is more than enough evidence out there to support and show that YOU NEED TO BE DOING SEARCH ACTIVELY. BOTH SEO AND PPC. (At least!)

Otherwise, you're just stupid.