VP, Emerging Media
Cam Balzer
What We Think About Emerging Opportunities

As one of the leading affiliate marketing networks, we are thoroughly familiar with one of the most aggressive and innovative groups of marketers on the Internet. Affiliate sites live and die by their ability to tap into new sources of low cost traffic. Affiliates were one of the earliest adopters of natural search optimization techniques, pay per click search, forums and social networking sites. By virtue of our relationships with these players and our visibility into the results of their performance marketing initiatives, we can spot the most promising and productive new opportunities.

We are investing in proactively watching and testing in the current emerging media landscape for the next big idea in search marketing. Pay per click was an evolutionary leap forward in marketing that grew out of the primordial stew of search. In web 1.0, the primary activity was trying to find things. That made search the nexus: everyone goes through there to get almost anywhere. And that provided the foundation for keyword targeting and the scale/speed for a dynamic pricing/performance model to emerge. Question is, will another evolutionary leap happen out of the new nexus of social networks? Now that hundreds of millions of people go through there for many kinds of personal connections, what new ad form will emerge? Display, sponsorships, and pay-per-click will certainly play a role there, but is there a "pay per node" or "pay per person" or another engagement driven model lurking out there that will change the game again?

DoubleClick Performics will be proactively sourcing viable engagement scenarios as the channel matures.