Pell, Geico, and Paid Search

Dave Pell recounts his excursion into buying AdWords based on the Geico keywords, and summarizes some new marketing realties:

My experience does clearly point to the fact that we have opened up a whole new marketing frontier that will require ad buyers and small businesses to be a lot more creative with their marketing plans. It’s not as simple as coming up with the most obvious search terms. As the market grows, those will become prohibitively expensive for most buyers. Ad buyers will need to predict what their potential buyers might be interested in and then try to get in front of them as they’re on the way to finding it. If you want to get in front of a few thousand potential orthodontics patients, you might have to figure out something more creative than the words teeth and braces. And in many cases, your marketing plan may only last for a few days (or even a few hours) at which time you’ll need to add new search terms to the mix.