Search News: Search Engines Make People Smarter, Ergo; Search Engine Advertising is Smart Advertising
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Written By Noah Mallin | October 14, 2008 | Share This
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A new study released by UCLA shows that using search engines actually improves brain activity associated with intelligent reasoning, especially in older folks. In your face Nicolas Carr! Carr of course wrote the now infamous Atlantic cover story titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” to which I mentally replied at the time, “Not us…maybe just you?” The UCLA study would seem to put to rest most of Carr’s reasoning as it includes actual rather than empirical data.
The study also makes more of what Sherman Potter would call “horse sense” than what Carr was peddling. The ability to research virtually any topic at your fingertips used to be the stuff of science fiction and yet here it is made real in our lifetimes. I’ll grant that not all of the data is trustworthy but do you believe everything you read in books?
Dr. Gary Small, who led the study for the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA had this to say:
“The bottom line is, when older people read a simulated book page, we see areas of the brain activated that you’d expect, the visual cortex, and areas that control language and reading… When they search on the Internet, they use the same areas, but there was much greater activation particularly in the front part, which controls decision-making and complex reasoning. But it was only for the people who had previous experience with the Internet.”
I would take this one step further and say that search results advertising, when done properly, is the smartest advertising there is. How so? Let’s take TV advertising by contrast. It’s big, its broadband, it’s expensively produced messages that are designed to tickle the simian forebrain where our fears and desires lay. How else to explain this?
Search advertising grabs for the reasoning ganglia and asks you to make a judgment – is this relevant? Do I want to know more? If the user clicks through what they want more often than not is more information – search goes right to the logic center. Even better, search ads can be highly targeted in a way that television (even cable) cannot — reaching people who are in the process of gathering the information they need to make a specific decision.
The smartness doesn’t end there – not by a long shot. A search advertising campaign generates loads of data on your customers interests and behaviors. This in turn can be used to inform everything from online ads, offline ads and creatives, even product development.
So search engines make advertisers smarter too, provided they make use of the information contained in their metrics and take advantage of the cost-effective nature of the platform to experiment from time to time.
Topics: Advertising: Offline, Advertising: Online, SEM: Paid Search, Search: How-To, Search: News, Web Analytics |