Omar Tawakol on search placed ads vs banner ads
Rating: hi tea
by Bena Roberts
At CTIA I had tea with Medio’s Omar Tawakol. I just listened to the interview and I should first of all thank Omar for his patience. I think I asked him the same question in three different ways until I finally got it.
Now, I am not saying that I am thick or Omar isn’t very clever and concise but I think I blame CTIA for the blood rush of information. But anyway – I am getting my grips around mobile search advertising vs banners. So basically pushing search results via a search engine vs brandishing advertising on sections of portals or content.
I am not going to embarrass myself by publishing the whole interview –but the core bits from Omar are:
Bena: please clarify Medio’s position on search vs banner ads
Omar: Advertising needs to answer a question. This is crucial. Mobile search is the way in which advertising can serve a purpose and provide results within a search query. Adverts in a search query must behave like the result. So its not that we don’t do banners or we do banners – the majority of queries command text results and hence a text response. But video queries or image results could result in the placing of a video or image sponsored search result.
Bena: So you can and do serve banners?
Omar: We can and do serve banners inside the content of published text. We launched this in April 2007 and some performance based queries can take some impressions out of the search. Our business model is to optimise all inventory. We don’t license the ad server we work as an ad network and the aim is to optimise ad inventory. If we don’t run the search, we can still push the ad via sponsored links.
The key points from Omar I will pull together with an interview I had with Brian Lent at CTIA about Medio’s new federated offering and analytics – for The Mobile Search Analyst.
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