Media Post’s Blog - http://blogs.mediapost.com/online_minute/?p=1301 – has coverage on a new JupiterResearch report claiming that the percentage of online advertising allocated to search will grow versus display advertising in the next 5 years.

As I see it, the biggest advantage to search advertising over display is the ability for the advertising to be targetted to a user’s intentions (based on the keywords entered.)

However, I find it hard to believe over the next 5 years there won’t be other technologies that allow other ads to also be targeted based on user’s intentions. Examples of this include behavioral targeting and obviously our next generation approach being introduced at mSpoke.

If these technologies are equally as good at understanding & targeting advertisements based on a user’s intentions I find it hard to believe the trend won’t shift the other way toward display advertising. What do you think?

Even with my negative post last night on Google, I should point out that I do have a tremendous amount of respect for the firm and what they are doing to lead generation (as one component of advertising and the one that search engine marketing does best.)

Om Malik has a post on GigaOM - http://gigaom.com/2006/07/25/field-notes-from-the-googleplex/ - about his recent trip to GooglePlex & interactions with a number of different employees.

The last interaction he describes is with Benjamin Ling, who is responsible for Google Checkout. Om reports,

He explained that if you spend $1,000 on the Google ad network, Google Checkout would process $10,000 worth of transactions for free. The more you spend on ads, the more transaction fee savings you get. “It will hyper accelerate our system,” he said. And with a twinkle in his eye, he said, “We make all our money on advertising.”

This is huge, what Google is good at is generating leads! With this new capability, there seems to be no doubt, they’ll track the purchase to the end of the system and truly know what those leads are worth. If they know this, they may eventually charge a cost per order instead of cost per click. (Based on Benjamin’s comments it looks like they want 10% of revenue for the lead – based on the ratio of $1k spent for $10k of transaction)

Brad Feld has a great post up title “My Work is Play to Me” I really resonated with it. When I joined Arthur Andersen in the summer of 1999, they had a lot of discussion about “work life balance.” They tried to convince us that we’d have this balance between work & play time and that if you “worked hard you could play hard too.”

What I’ve found since then, is that when I’m working hard and creating something, it feels like playing! Brad does a great job explaining this … …

http://www.feld.com/blog/archives/001864.html

There was a very interesting panel at ad:tech investigating advertising on social networking sites.  Here is iMedia Connection’s Coverage -http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/10585.asp

It certainly will be interesting to see how this plays out.  My instinct is there is a great way to monetize these sites, but the advertising targeting will need to evolve.  I think I know just the company to help.

Having explained mSpoke’s vision repeatedly with a number of potential partners, customers & investors over the last year – there is a pattern that you’d have to be trying to miss at this point … The Google objection!