Nothing Like a Good Chinwag!

On Tuesday night this week in London I decided to go down to the PPC Earchquake Chinwag event at the Slug and Lettuce in Soho. I was looking forward to having a beer and a good night of being in the audience for once and listening in rather than speaking.

But within 3 minutes of arriving I was asked by the organisers to be on the panel, as a member of the panel had dropped out! No search rest for the wicked you could say!

Chinwag managed to get a great turn out of people across the board, the event is to be put out on a Pod Cast next week to boot. With a follow up session at Internet World on 3rd May.

Not the best picture but that's me in the middle! There was some good questions and some contention... which is always good! The 90 mins of Q and A flew by and it was nice to see me old mate Teddie from Neutralize again, even if we had only been at Search Marketing World 2007 in Dublin the week before!

Good event Chinwag look forward to the rerun!

The £2 Billion is here!

Today I attend the IAB Conference at which the annual media spend figures were launched. It amazed me to hear that this has been run for 10 years now and in the first year 4 media owners supplied figures. This year 102 did!

Online has finally passed the £2 Billion mark in 2006. And it is great to see that Paid Search makes up 57.8% (£1.165 Billion) the second largest segment in the online area was Display at 22.8%.

Looking at this against 2005 which was around £1.4 billion online spending, it gives us a year on year growth of 41.2%. This is great and shows the shift in media spend with areas like TV dropping by 4.7% year on year and the whole industry only up by 1.1%. the market is being driven by Online and within that paid Search is the main driver.

Looking at the big picture of all media spend, Internet now has an 11.4% slice of the media pie in 2006 which is up from 7.8% in 2005.

More data on the numbers can be found at http://www.iabuk.net/en/1/iabadspend2006.mxs

Bamber Gascoigne launches a search engine. yes, really!

Got an email today from a Colleague at Latitude with a url to this site and at first I must admit I though Bamber Gascoigne....No Way!

You have to ask yourself what is Bamber upto, but once you start to play with the concept it actually becomes quite addictive, you can find out anything that happened in any year, so quite useful. You still have to ask you self why Bamber? but it is something that will come in handy at quiz night!

http://www.timesearch.info/timesearch/default.asp?conid=home

The Church of Search!

This week I was over in Dublin speaking at Search marketing World 2007 conference. This was Ireland's first ever Search marketing event so as a lot of the speakers arrived the night before and we were catching up. I think it was fair to say that we did not know what to expect the next day.....would many people come!!!!

In the usual way people had descended on Dublin by plane for the corners of the Globe with the like of Chris Sherman, Danny Sullivan and Jeffrey Rohrs coming in from the US and a whole host of us appearing form Europe.

As ever great to catch up with all the usual faces and see what was new in the World of Search and a thanks to Martin Murry the event organiser for hosting us that night! It was also good to see the only other Geordie I have known for a lot of years in search Mike Grehan.

On the day of the event it was great to get there in the morning and see so many attendees buzzing around in anticipation of the days events at a location that was steeped in history.

You may be wondering why i have entitled this blog the 'Church of Search'...well this purely comes down to the location of my talk. On landing I went to look for the speaking room to survey where I would be doing my bit later and all I can say was WOW!


This is the Baroque Chapel which we renamed the Church of Search on the day and is has to be said it is not often you get to speak in places like this!

On the day the choice of topic for me was Click Fraud and myself, Jeffery Rohrs and Shuman Ghosemajumder met up again from SES London panel in February this year to pitch in with Matt Trimmer being a new addition to the panel.

On the whole the event was great and hats off to the organisers for getting us all together and all those people down to listen.....looking forward to 2008!!