Sponsored Content WEBINAR: ELECTION 2008: E-mail Tips from a Political Insider   WEBINAR: Becoming the Illusionist: The Magic of Using "Brand" to Drive Response without Results Disappearing in the Process   WEBINAR: Score and Win Through Cooperation   TOOLS OF THE TRADE: Holiday's are prime-time for email marketing - maximize your ROI by getting to the inbox   ON DEMAND WEBINAR--MASTER CLASS: High Performance Online and Off-line Strategies for Large Scale Customer Acquisition   FREE WHITE PAPER - Direct Mail and the Internet Find any supplier you need - agencies, CRM, fulfillment, lists, e-commerce, paper, printers, telemarketing, and more. Featured Categories Lists and Data Telemarketing Database Marketing E-commerce Web Marketing Agency & Creative Services Print, Production & Paper Lists and Data Processing :: view all categories Get free access to more than 50,000 list data cards - one of the most comprehensive databases in the industry. >> Search Now DIRECT Buzz Blog Webinars Buyer's Guide Calculators JobZone ListFinder Promo Calendar Research Store E-Newsletters Print Magazine This Month in Direct Magazine Deal With It Direct had a full house for this year's list roundtable. Considering all the additional responsibilities on brokers' plates, that's impressive... See Full July Issue

How can you tell search marketing has gone main stream? Well, it might be the moonshot prices the engines have offered for recent acquisitions such as Doubleclick and aQuantive. Or you could note, as The Times Online did last month, that Google, a company that went public less than three years ago, now has greater capitalization than McDonald’s and Walt Disney combined.

Or you could point to the fact that search marketing is now being sold through TV spots.

About two weeks ago SendTec, the St. Petersburg FL-based search marketing agency, started airing a one-minute commercial for its services on an array of business-related channels. The all-animated spot—no action shots of SendTec analysts compiling keyword lists or poring over server logs—asks viewers if their search engine campaigns have been “maximized” and points them to www.12.SendTecNOW.com.

Once on that landing page, the video spot say, they can answer a ferw questions and receive a free SWOT analysis (“strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats”) of their current search marketing campaign from SendTec’s analysts. The landing page qualification section gathers some basic contact information, asks if the visitor’s company is currently doing paid search and what the monthly SEM budget is, and what URL they’re driving traffic to. It also asks them to select a search marketing objective from a drop-down menu of three: acquiring leads, selling goods or services directly, or driving traffic to retail, dealers or the Web.

Visitors who fill out the form and qualify also get a download of an e-book, “50 Biggest Search Engine Marketing Mistakes”.

SendTec chairman and CEO Paul Soltoff says the ad has been running on the major business channels—CNN, CNBC, MSNBC and Fox-- in the morning drive-time hours and then again in the evening, to a “very significant response”.

“The campaign has been running for less than two weeks now, and we’ve already had northward of 50 companies who have engaged with us,” he says. That doesn’t mean all those leads were qualified—SendTec is looking for prospects who spend at least $30,000 a month on search marketing—but it’s a strong enough start for Soltoff.

“The fact that we’re getting that kind of involvement speaks of interest in the category and an intention to improve whatever these businesses are doing in search,” he says. The responses so far have been evenly split between companies handling SEM in-house and those who outsource to another agency.

The time was right to start acquiring SEM customers over the airwaves, Soltoff says. He points out that global spending on search marketing is projected to exceed $9 billion this year, with big brands contributing to that total as they increasingly shift budgets to online marketing. But the influx of new marketers and the infusion of new ad dollars has also led to rising keyword costs in some segments and created ROI problems for search marketers almost across the board.

“People are starting to approach points of marginal diminishing returns in search,” he says. “Their ROI are decreasing; their costs per click are going up. They’re starting to hit the wall in search engine marketing.

“We think the search engine marketing opportunity is now large enough, and that there are enough business out there looking to improve ROI, that we can use a broad marketing medium such as television to engage business and develop prospects. There are enough companies out there looking to regain search profitability to justify using a heavy-lifting tactic like direct response television.”

The campaign is intended to target clients who are spending at least $30,000 a month on search marketing, Soltoff says.

According to him, the SendTec team conceived the notion of using DRTV to drum up search business before Google kicked online ad consolidation into high gear last April with its offer to buy DoubleClick. But he doesn’t deny that the sight of Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft writing large checks to buy online ad platforms and traditional ad agencies acquiring search firms makes this a good time for an independent agency such as SendTec to make some noise.

“The consolidation creates even more competitive problems for companies, because they may no longer want to use who they may have been using [for search marketing] in the past” Soltoff says. “The stars have aligned for us on this one.”

While it might seem strange for the average search marketing firm to go offline to market itself, SendTec and Soltoff both have deep roots in the DRTV world. Before founding the company, Soltoff was the founder and driving force behind the DRTV division of Saatchi & Saatchi Worldwide. And SendTec regularly integrates search marketing with DRTV as part of its service offering, tracking the online response to clients’ offline campaigns.

While SendTec’s TV spot was originally intended to run for a few weeks, Soltoff says that flight may be extended. “We’ll see how the results go, but we hope not to take it down,” he says. “And we expect that there are going to be a lot of other search companies following along behind us. Not only is this generating activity for us, but it’s branding the agency, and I think others are going to do the same.”