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"Welcome to the Search Engine Roundtable coverage of Search Engine Strategies Chicago 2007.  The crowd seems to be fairly large, with people trickling in and smooth lines in the registration booth.  I am excited to get things cooking!  This first session will be moderated by Dana Todd of SiteLab International, who is also on the SEMPO Board of Directors.  She welcomes everyone to SES Chicago, and announces some of the new formatting, including the Orion panels.John du Pre Gaunt from eMarketer will kick the session off, with a slide deck titled \u201CMobile Search and Marketing Dollars.\u201D  He will be providing some information based on studies performed during July 2007.  Briefly introduces eMarketer, and his mobile-defined role there.  Talks about \u201Cthe stakes.\u201D  This is a battle of the newest and possibly biggest digital interface that has become available since the World Wide Web.  Nobody has \u201Ccracked the problem cold\u201D circa 2007.  We are still looking for the search category and/or specific mobile search needed to drive it into the mainstream.  This is a process involving technical considerations combined with social engineering.  There is a social environment where search is now integrated into people\u2019s activities, but mobile search isn\u2019t there yet \u2013 primarily he feels because there isn\u2019t a main industry or category focused on it.The three major industries so far are mobile telecom, web portals, and Yellow Pages/Directories charging into mobile search.  With very few exceptions, the biggest web players and the biggest telecom players don\u2019t like sharing with each other.  It is hard to transfer search history and other collected data between the two, in order to better serve the searcher.  The clich\u00E9 that \u201Cmobile search is about answers instead of links\u201D is not totally true.  It is true that the consumer is more often on the cusp of making a decision or taking an action \u2013 the trick is how easy they can turn their search into a direct action.The mobile search advertising objectives are typical: classic direct response content sales, local advertising, branding, etc.  If you wrap them together, mobile is in fact a marketing interface.  let\u2019s start talking numbers.  They feel there will be 900 million global mobile users worldwide by 2011, and shows a chart depicting the growth of mobile search revenues from 6.8m in 2006 to 2.3B by 2011.  U.S. specific:  by 2011 around 55M mobile search users (daily or several times a week) versus 64.8M total mobile internet users.  The US revenues will grow to 700m into 2011. Kelsey Group predicts US mobile search revenues in 2011 at about 920M, which even though is 200m separate, this is statistically \u201Cclose enough.\u201DThere is a strong correlation with mobile internet use and mobile search.  of the people using mobile internet, 75% will search, where those not using mobile internet regularly only 20% will use it to search.  He then shows a iCrossing study result showing actual use numbers that I didn\u2019t catch.  Scale: planning for world wide smart phone shipments.  You have to start planning now for during Christmas 2009 when a $99 Blackberry will be available that will be able to handle mobile html and has qwerty keyboard.  In 2011, 324M units will be sold.  Networks are also important. There is a correlation with mobile search use and higher speed networks.  3G versus non-3G subscribers indicate a much higher percentage of users on the 3G side.Lastly, on the monetization aspect, initial consumer receptivity to seeing ads is there.  People are willing to use systems that charge lower monthly subscription fees and include advertising.  He shows a couple slides to illustrate his opinion that there will be some consolidation in this market over the next few years.  Dana asks the crowd if they are taking mobile budget out of existing search budget versus other budgets like brand budget.  Most say the search budget.  John says that people are still often in experimental stage using \u201Cplay money.\u201D  Some audience members echo this idea.  Some industries are now in full blown use, like entertainment and food and beverage.  They feel that travel is also starting to play a bigger role, having \u201Cmore serious\u201D mobile search campaigns.Dana asks if we all still need to go ot and make WAP versions of our sites? John feels that WAP as a separate build over time will start to diminish towards something more html like.  However, how WAP handles data is actually pretty good, so he feels there will still see a certain amount of WAP investment in another area of the stack.  Dana follows up with is it important to buy up \u201C.mobi\u201D extensions?  John feels this is still a growing area, but some people are starting to look into this.About use: not many people are using mobile search yet for random things like being in a bar in Scotland and wanting to know who Henry the 8th\u2019s 5th wife is.  Most searches still involve local services etc, which is a problem since so many of the smaller local sites have not built m specific landing pages.Jeff Torgeson, Idearc Media Corp.  he starts about the difference between mobile local and mobile local search.  he is coming from it from the mobile local space, and he kind of thinks of it as a feed like product.  He talks about the players that do great things in mobile local, like Google, superpages.com, en pocket, admob, ad infuse, Idearc, third screen media, and Yahoo!.  The mission for them is to make this an easy industry/marketing tactic for executives to understand.  Others include Android and Moorestown, which is coming out from Intel in about 2009 with a new mobile ad platform.  These two show that people are thinking differently about what will happen in this space in the future.  If you start talking about having a WAP site and there is no proven money there, executives will not like this.  We have to engage the small business owners to get on board, and then once they have success there will be a hockey stick effect and lots more larger companies joining in.They are trying to figure out through their YP sites and superpages.com how to best move forward in this space.  They are trying to solve the problems of landing on irrelevant or non content-rich pages, which lowers user experience (paraphrased).  He hopes that people will start using more of an adaptive rendering type of system in order to display the proper content \u2013 we need to make some technology progress there.They found that Mobile Local users are definitely transactional in nature, like John did.  Types of things people search for: large retails chains (surprising considering you would think people would know where they are in their area), dine out/go out, home improvement, and traditional brand.  They have been testing limiting the number of categories coming back to users.  For example, a search for \u201Ccoffee\u201D will not return the bulk/wholesale coffee results, since it unlikely that m users are looking for that.Shows a slide of a baby trying to grab a big jug of milk, captioned \u201Cwant.\u201D  This describes how people are when they are on Mobile Local Search.  If someone is looking for a service, and they have a GPS phone, and you can prove to them that they showed up at the doorstep, this would be a cool way to add value to the MS ad market.  Need to be more forward thinking on the types of ads served.They are focused on User Experience.  Blackberry: keyword versus category searches are an example of the types of things they can analyze to improve UX \u2013 since most users on both Blackberry (around 55%) and iPhone (around 75%) use category searches.  He doesn\u2019t believe in the need to build out .mobi sites, etc, but feels that you should focus on the one site and provide better technology to sniff the browser.  Dana says she is sick to death of hearing \u201Cit\u2019s great \u2013 go buy it.\u201D  Asks the audience what kind of traffic/results they have been getting?  One audience member is not satisfied at all with the traffic.  She asks from a \u201Cnewby\u201D perspective how to actually setup a mobile ad.  Jeff says that the industry is very fragmented right now so it is difficult to learn how to do it.  Not pushing YP, but that is a good way to approach the space   John adds that if you are learning, you better have \u201Cfunny money\u201D because it may take some time to test to fruition.  He thinks that we are in a similar stage to mobile search as regular search was in the mid-nineties.  So, buy mobile space through YP or ad networks.  \u201CIt truly is a \u2018one check\u2019 kind of deal right now.\u201D  Dana had asked Yahoo! why there isn\u2019t a single interface to deal with all these systems?  She said their answer made her kind of mad, because they suggested that SEMs should be creating this.  What are the emerging technologies for managing and tracking this stuff?  Jeff encourages that advertisers should think about  the differences in the space \u2013 it is presently more difficult to provide just one platform for all this since everything is still so fractured.That will be all for now\u2026catch the rest of the Q/A at the next SES.  Note that the new SES format of having moderator-led discussion after the presentations and prior to audience questions went nicely, as Dana was able to handle this well.***Note this is \u201Clive\u201D unedited blog coverage of SES Chicago 2007.  Some typos, grammatical errors, or incomplete thoughts may exist."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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