Covario Advances Strategy with New Business Paradigm for Managing Large Scale Search – Beginning with SEO

Covario Advances Strategy with New Business Paradigm for Managing Large Scale Search – Beginning with SEO

Company responds to industry to deliver “Automated Data-Driven Agency” model

SAN JOSE (SES 2009) SAN DIEGO — August 11, 2009 — Covario Inc., Covario, the leader in enterprise-scale search marketing solutions, today at SES San Jose announced an advancement to its business strategy to further integrate its award-winning analytics automation technology offerings with its agency services due to the growing advertiser market demand. As part of this strategy, Covario has added a world-class SEO delivery team, headed by Mike Gullaksen, who has led projects at advertisers from Coca Cola to Bank of America, to compliment its Organic Search Insight technology, currently in use at over 50 different global advertisers including Intel Corporation, Procter & Gamble, T-Mobile, Research In Motion, and others. This announcement marks a turning point in Covario’s strategy – combining technology and services to drive the most efficient possible SEO management strategies available in the market.

A New Agency Paradigm
Covario’s move is part of a wider trend in the advertising industry – namely the development of the “Automated Data-Driven Agency” model. Advertisers are demanding a change to their traditional agency relationships for managing all forms of advertising, from TV purchases, to display advertising, to search, both paid and organic. The advent of technologies, from Google TV, to cost-per-click based targeted display advertising programs, to systems like Organic Search insight, are changing the fundamental economics of how agencies deliver advertising solutions. Advertisers are demanding increased financial accountability, transparency, and most importantly, data-driven strategies as a prerequisite to manage their advertising programs. Agencies that are unable to provide these capabilities are subject to either replacement by agencies that embrace technology, in-sourcing by the advertisers, or relegation to managing only the creative development – as opposed to the media purchasing and planning processes.

* For example, advertisers like Lenovo, the global provider of personal computing technologies such as ThinkPad, are leveraging Google TV to manage and automate their own TV spot purchases in order to get more targeted media buys at more affordable prices than the packaged media buys offered by traditional agencies.

“We wanted to find more efficient ways to purchase all of our media – from TV, to display, to search – in order to drive improved coverage and results in our advertising programs,” says Gary Milner, Global Marketing Director at Lenovo Corporation. “We review all of our agency relationships and those organizations not offering efficiencies through the use of technologies, otherwise we do the media purchases in house. We did a very successful buy of TV time through Google TV, which allowed us lower prices, more flexibility with creative promotions and far more internal accountability.”

* The same can be said for display, where organizations like Turn and MediaMath allow advertisers and their agencies to offer highly targeted display ads through performance-based pricing models instead of the traditional bulk “impression buys” at pre-determined CPM rates.

* And in search, Covario is pioneering the use of Data Driven Decisions (D3) for SEO – a highly automated system, combined with its agency services, to manage SEO based on ROI and in a far more scalable way than other agencies that use manual processes to do keyword research, auditing and reporting.

Delivering What is Demanded – Covario’s D3 Example

With overall spend on interactive advertising moving from 12 percent of overall media spend in 2009, to 21 percent in 2014, according to Forrester Research, the needs for automation and harnessing of data will become far more pronounced. This is part of the overall trend across not just interactive advertising, but all advertising channels like TV, print, radio, display – that the agency model must incorporate technologies that provide visibility and automation – as the advertisers no longer accept manual processes and Excel.

According to Forrester Research, US advertisers will spend $2.5 billion dollars in 2009 on services and technologies for SEO, and this investment is expected to grow at 15 percent annually through 2015. The firm also found that 54 percent of this investment is spent with agencies. Covario found that somewhere between 30-40 percent of this investment by advertisers is sub-optimized today – invested in manual processes that can be automated through technologies like Organic Search Insight, allowing advertisers to move $750 million to $1 billion of spending to more productive advertising and technical activities like improving Web experience, improving content development, and building more effective linking strategies.

Covario is addressing this challenge initially with its SEO practice and latest solution D3, which is headed up by Mike Gullaksen, VP of SEO Service. D3 brings together technology for automating the process of managing organic search programs for large advertisers, and world-class SEO services to help advertisers drive the changes necessary to improve brand position and marketing results through search engines. This is consistent with the overall trend in advertising – replacing manual processes with automation, and personal expertise with data and insight to drive prioritization and strategy.

* David Robidoux, VP of interactive marketing from Franchise Services said: “By automating much of the manual data gathering around keyword research, auditing, and reporting, we have been able to dedicate our SEO investments into making the changes to our web properties that drive improved results on Google. With this system, we are able to do more faster regarding SEO.”

* Gullaksen at Covario said: “This is a common theme across all advertising categories – the relentless automation of process in order to make advertising, particularly digital advertising, more effective and efficient is increasingly becoming a deciding factor in agency selection. In SEO, as well as all advertising channels, Covario’s ‘next generation’ approach – one that leverages automation to its fullest, provides visibility and reporting to advertisers, and focuses efforts on the issues that drive change is winning business and delivering results. “

Covario will be discussing its new strategy, the concept of the “Automated Data-Driven Agency” model, and D3 at SES San Jose, August 10-14, 2009. Covario’s executives will also be speaking at the show on Wednesday, August 12 at 9:00 a.m. (Credit Crunch: The Death of Last Click Attribution and its Impact on Paid Search Advertising) and 4:00 p.m. (“The BuyerSphere Project: Understanding B2B Buyer Patterns”).

About Covario, Inc.

Covario, Inc. is the leading provider of search marketing solutions for large advertisers. The Covario portfolio provides global organizations with robust interactive and search marketing analytics solutions for paid search advertising and organic search engine optimization across the enterprise and throughout the channel. Covario enables complex and distributed organizations to control brand integrity, ensure budget transparency and deliver quantifiable results across business units, distribution channels and languages. Headquartered in San Diego, Covario’s growing customer list include some of the world’s best known brands in high tech manufacturing, financial services, electronics, media, entertainment, publishing and consumer packaged goods.