In Search Engine Guide: Seeking Marketing Talent With Left-Brain Minds, DM News makes the point that marketers who have relied on “right brain” creative-types for success need to start using both halves of their collective brains.
The article points out that search engine marketing has become a technical and quantitative discipline, requiring management of thousands (or even hundreds of thousands) of keywords, tracking and maximizing their bids and ROI, etc.
The odd thing about the article is that it would appear in DM News, the bible of direct marketing. DM has always been a bastion of quants and techies. Direct mail firms have long used sophisticated technology for mailing list manipulation, highly targeted personalization, multi-variable correlation analysis, and much more.
Even the “creative” in DM pieces is often driven by numbers, with minor variations in a successful control package being constantly evaluated for performance, and no creative change being made without thorough testing.
Despite the incongruity of DM News suddenly discovering the left side of the brain, the article may wake up a few agencies or clients who haven’t realized just how technical search engine marketing has become.
