Circos Brand Karma

Where have I been? I just heard about the Google Online Marketing Challenge.

According to SearchEngineWatch,

Search marketing firms and in-house teams often have a hard time finding qualified PPC employees. Now Google may change all that by challenging students all over the world to compete with others in an AdWords marketing competition, indoctrinating college students to the PPC culture and boosting SME participation in local search.

Professors and over 8000 students (724 US teams) from all over the world are already signed up to participate before the Feb 1 deadline for entries.

According to Google, the competition goes like this:

Given my previous post re: SEM Haves and Have Nots, I think in the short term it’s good that in this contest Google is helping local businesses by tapping into the energy and intelligence of the academic community. However, I don’t know how good it is that they’re also raising the bar for future businesses to require even more expertise in SEM.

My concern is that more SEM expert will create ever more sophisticated hacking of the PPC model, raising the bar higher for efficacy. As a result, the need for expertise is even greater, driving up the price for SEM experts, meaning small businesses will be unable to afford them. This makes the divide between those with resources… e.g. the current SEM Haves, vs. the Have Nots even greater. And it’s still not about how a business performs for their customers, except, I guess, how they get people’s attention online.