Fionn Downhill – Digital Shenanigans

The SEMPO AZ group welcomed Kevin Wilk, the senior agency development manager at Yahoo!, for its second get together at the AZ Club in downtown Phoenix. Wilk gave a presentation entitled Paid and Display Integration – Closing the Loop with Search, to an audience made up of over 50 attendees.

The newly formed SEMPO AZ group was created with the purpose to provide a foundation for industry growth by creating awareness, forming strong relationships, promoting the industry, offering education, driving research, and creating a better understanding of search and its role in the marketing industry.

As in the inaugural SEMPO AZ get together, and the many more to come, there was a raffle for a high tech related prize. At the first meeting it was a SEMPO Institute fundamentals learning course, valued at about $400, which was won by an employee of iCrossing. iCrossing kept its winning streak alive last night when Rebecca Brown won the coveted iPhone, provided by Sitewire.

The main message of Wilk’s presentation was that companies need to ensure that their offline advertising and brand building needs to be integrated with the same message online, both organic and paid. Focusing just on the online section, Wilk stressed the importance of taking advantage of both search and display advertising. One case study he shared was that of Adidas and Kevin Garnett, Adidas’ NBA endorsee. On days when Adidas showed the ad on Yahoo!’s home page, searches for Adidas and Kevin Garnett, skyrocketed. People didn’t necessarily click on the home page ad, but the ad drove people to search for the two topics, thus supporting the need to correlate your display and search advertising, as well as your online and offline advertising.