Having read all the hype surrounding the Search Engine Strategies event in San Jose, we jumped into the car yesterday morning excited about the prospect of discovering something new.

Unfortunately, we were disappointed. Wandering around the event we all came to the same conclusion: Every search marketing agency sounds the same.

Almost every agency we talked with was, in their words, the “biggest”, “largest” or “industry-leading” company in the search marketing industry. OK guys, marketing rule number one - differentiate yourselves from the competition.

As we continued around the event, I got to thinking: If I was a prospect looking for an agency to represent my company, I’d  throw my hands up in the air and make the decision to handle search marketing in house.
So what’s the problem? What are the search marketing agencies doing wrong?

Search marketing agencies are not marketing agencies, and it shows. Their sales pitches are repetitive and confusing. Their presentations static and their marketing literature full of unintelligible jargon and unsubstantiated claims.

Here’s a few examples taken from the literature I brought back with me:

Since 2003, [name removed] has delivered proven traffic to over 100,000 advertisers through our exclusive [name removed] technology - while maximizing yield and transparency for more than 250,000 web properties.

[Name removed] has developed a semantic tool which infers the probable meanings of words in context, while it learns from users how to judge meanings for future cases.

Can someone tell me what the heck they’re talking about?

It appears the search marketing industry has some homework to do. While there’s often talk about how the traditional advertising and marketing agencies don’t understand what’s going on in search marketing, the opposite is also true. The search agencies would do well to study David Ogilvy and John Caples, two of the pioneers’ of traditional advertising. Because any company that uses the word “marketing” or “advertising” to describe what they do, should, at the very least,  do a good job marketing themselves.

Tags: bad advertising, bad marketing, hype, marketing agencies, Search Marketing, seo

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 31st, 2008 at 1:25 pm and is filed under Search Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.