*Search marketing is finally getting more sophisticated and entering the mainstream. What will the market look like 18 months from now?
In most Asia-Pacific countries, search is still very nascent. We're seeing new businesses trialling search, experimenting with it, and then once they see the results, making it a core part of their marketing strategy. Not just with Google but with other substantial players in the region. In Australia, it's true that there's more businesses using search marketing (and site targeting in the Google content network), but with the sophistication you refer to comes precision. We're seeing major advertisers and agencies here really running precise campaigns, with different keywords, combinations of keywords, at different times of day and different regions. They can measure the results of all this. But I want to stress that although Australian marketers and agencies are embracing search and online advertising generally, we're really still at the early stages. There's so much growth to come. As online content explodes, search becomes more important to navigate it all, and therefore more important for advertisers looking to reach users. It's way too early to talk about consolidation - if anything, we're going to see new players, new technology, new ways of disseminating information, new cross-language search, voice and video search. There's a long way to go.
*The “pretty dire” economic turmoil has not left Google immune, as Eric Schmidt forecast. How is Google navigating the online advertising slump and where is Asia Pacific positioned?
It's true that we're in uncertain economic times and no-one is immune. It's impossible to predict when the economy will turn around, or whether things will get much worse. In terms of this region, we do however see there being enormous headroom for search to grow. It's currently underutilised as a marketing channel in Asia and as marketers see the measurability, accountability and results they get from search campaigns, they recognise the value of the platform, in both good times and bad. Plus, with broadband growth accelerating throughout the region, this will move more users and businesses online. So, these factors mean that we're confident of the long term future of online advertising in Asia and this is largely why we're investing so substantially in new products and search quality improvements throughout the region - from Korea to Australia. We want to give our users in this region the best search experience and results. *How much is Asia/Pac and Australia contributing to overall Google growth? And where is growth coming from? I don't have a specific number, but for the reasons above, Asia Pacific and Australia are very important to Google. In Australia, the growth is coming from new advertisers - retailers, SMEs, financial companies coming online for the first time, as well as existing advertisers allocating larger proportions of their budget to search marketing. It's really across the board - Karim Temsamani and the local industry teams are doing a great job helping more businesses get online, and run effective campaigns. *How is Australia/New Zealand positioned for growth and where will it come from. Is Google still increasing head count in Australia and through the region? If so by how much in the year ahead? We're still hiring, but at a reduced rate. We have around 300 employees in Sydney and we're moving to a new headquarters here soon. Search is going to continue to grow here in Australia and New Zealand. Query volume is up -retail searches on Google were over 30% higher in December 2008 than December 2007. As Nielsen Online figures show, more Australians are spending more time online than ever before. It's Australia's largest medium. And internet speeds are getting faster. I think lots of SMEs are thinking about getting online. The web has really become the place that consumers first turn to find local businesses. And major brands are deepening their engagement, having trialled and liking the results of their search campaigns. Longer term, I think you'll see growth for Google coming from mobile services, as well as display advertising on YouTube and on other sites in our content network.
*What is your strategy in the social networking space, how are you taking on the “poor man’s email system”(aka Twitter as branded by Eric Schmidt)?
Great question. I take it you're referring to Twitter, on which Google recently set up an account @google? If you read the full interview, you'll see that Eric did, and we all, welcome the innovation that companies like Twitter and other new entrants online provide. It empowers more people to get online, share and communicate, whether online or on their mobile. Web users aren't just consumers any more - they're creators. We've known this for a very long time. Our job is to help users find all the content they're interested in. In turn, we're helping a lot of these sites - from Friendster to MySpace and dozens of others - monetise their content through our AdSense program. To your broader question, though, what we see is the entire web becoming more social. There will absolutely continue to be websites where you go to "be social" with a certain group of contacts, whether for fun or business. Orkut, which is the leading social network in Brazil in India, is a classic example of this. In addition, many other sites on the web are better when you have your friends, or some relevant subset of your friends there with you. You're starting to see the whole web becoming more social. That's why we're investing in developer and webmaster technologies like OpenSocial and Google Friend Connect; these projects are "social plumbing" for the whole web, not just Google sites. For example, OpenSocial enables web developers to build web apps that work on dozens of popular social networks, including MySpace, Bebo and Friendster which are popular in this region.
* What is your view on where this area is heading in terms of news dissemination and its competitive threat to Google?
This is not a new trend. We've been aware of, and at the forefront of this for many years. It's exciting, because the web is getting more social, and consumers are becoming producers. But it's a trend that started long ago. We have more engineers working on search than anything else, we have great speed and scale, and we crawl pages constantly, so we're in a good position to surface user generated content, and get users to where they want to go. What successful online sites and publishers realise is that people will come to your content from a variety of sources - news sites, blogs, search engines, social networks, emails. I know in Australia that Yellow Pages last year made their listings crawlable by search engines. Openly available content is what users want and what helps publishers reach audiences. The Internet's early days of controlled web portals have proven that walled gardens don't work on the web.
*Is acquisition part of the A/Pac strategy, with a number of Australian tech companies already in the Google fold, are you looking actively for any missing pieces of the puzzle?
There's no plans right now. We're really happy with the engineering talent we've brought on board in Australia, including Lars Rasmussen and his brother Jens who developed what became Google Maps all those years ago. They're still with us and doing great things.
*Your analytics evangelist Avinash Kaushik recently referred to HITS as “How Idiots Track Success" preaching on the value measurement based on quality when addressing a publishers conference. He added that publishers moving online need to generate “irrational loyalty, at scale”, have you got any guidance for struggling Asia Pac print publishers moving online to get over the online migration hurdles faster and with less destruction to their existing business?
It's really not my place to advise, but I definitely don't see an online presence as a hindrance to offline assets. In fact, it's a necessity given the way that users consume media these days. I believe that quality, unique online content that engages audiences, and involves a two-way dialogue, can attract incredible loyalty and incremental revenue. Let users feel that they own your site, that they can shape it and participate in it. That will attract both hits, repeat visitors and loyalty. Did President Obama's massive online fundraising campaign hinder his offline efforts? Of course not. They reached new audiences and inspired great loyalty. Remember that the internet has been mainstream for about 10 years. We're really just at the beginning of this. There's a long way for content and engagement models to evolve, and technology is advancing to let it happen. *Your view on the standardisation of metrics for online and how that will be facilitated locally? Well I know Karim and the local team are working through the IAB processes on this. It's an important issue to give confidence to advertisers across the medium. However, I have to say that this isn't an issue that keeps our clients up at night. They get incredibly granular traffic and analytics data for all campaigns they run on Google and throughout the content network. So we don't live and breathe this problem day to day, but we want to help resolve it because we know that our clients want it sorted out.
