New York City 2007:First page Agenda

Craig MacDonald, Vice President of Marketing, Alliances and Product Management

SEMDirector

Title: Leveraging Mobile Search as an Advertising Platform: Promise vs. Execution

Mobile is a hot topic in the advertising community. Advertisers want to know how to leverage mobile devices in order to promote products and services and allow consumers to search on company brands to find out information. The promise is large; however the execution continues to be difficult.

In a recent campaign SEMDirector ran for a consumer electronics manufacturer, the SEMDirector team found that for a set of campaigns to run on both Google Search and Google Mobile, the cost of the advertisements on the mobile platform was about 20% of the cost of advertising on the standard search platform; however, the conversion rate on Google Mobile was about 10% of that on the standard Google Search platform.

Why? Because the consumer did not have as high quality experience on mobile as on “regular” interactive advertising programs. The landing page:

* was slow to open on the mobile device
* was not formatted appropriately
* had no clear “call to action”
* in some cases, did not open at all

All of these issues are fixable; however, it is clear that leveraging mobile as an advertising platform requires organizations to consider the specific constraints of the mobile devices in order to make the user experience for mobile search and advertising more profitable.

Description of SEMDirector Inc

SEMDirector, Inc. is the leader in search marketing automation software. The SEMDirector portfolio provides global organizations with robust search marketing automation solutions for paid search advertising and organic search engine optimization across the enterprise and throughout the channel. With SEMDirector, complex, distributed organizations can control brand integrity, ensure budget transparency and deliver quantifiable results across business units, distribution channels and local languages.

About Craig MacDonald, Vice President of Marketing, Alliances and Product Management

Craig Macdonald has an impressive track record of leading, innovating and managing strategic business initiatives in the technology industry. As vice president of marketing, alliances and product management, Craig is responsible for the strategic direction, development and marketing of the SEMDirector portfolio of solutions.

Most recently, Craig was the director of product management for the service and management group within Hewlett Packard’s OpenView division. His responsibilities included service and asset management, configuration management, and discovery applications used by large enterprises worldwide. Formerly, he was vice president of product marketing and product management at Peregrine Systems, Inc. Before joining Peregrine, Craig was vice president of analytic tools at Fair Isaac Company where he was responsible for P&L and all product management activities for analytic product lines.

Prior to that, Craig was group vice president for Fair Isaac’s opportunity solutions group working with such companies as CitiCorp, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley Dean Witter. At Fair Isaac, he also had responsibility for Intelligent Response Solutions, a business unit that developed highly sophisticated text analysis technology for use in online search and automated response, working with Schwab, eBay, Amazon and Dell. Prior to Fair Isaac’s acquisition, Craig also served as executive director of strategic marketing at HNC, developing a strategy for the company’s entrance into the retail brokerage market.

Craig MacDonald