A new generation of corporate marketing executives was in attendance last week when San Diego-based Covario convened its fourth annual corporate partners conference at the downtown Hard Rock Hotel. As a rock band jammed onstage, the gathering crowd included JP Morgan Chase’s vice president of search governance, Amgen’s senior marketing manager for oncology, and the consumer insight manager for Sony Online Entertainment.
Search governance? Consumer insight? Welcome to the world of corporate search engine marketing.
Covario, a startup backed by Seattle-based Voyager Capital, Dubilier & Co., and FT Ventures, specializes in interactive marketing technologies and services. It holds the meeting each year to discuss the latest trends in the highly specific world of search engine marketing and online advertising.
Search engine marketing, which promotes websites in search engine results by paying to ensure certain search terms are displayed (and by other techniques), is a highly profitable business dominated by Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. Covario operates in a different segment, providing Web-based tools, analytical software, and other technologies that enable companies to optimize their websites and to measure just how much bang they get for each search-term buck they pay to Google and the other big boys.
Search engine marketing is growing much faster than traditional advertising. For all its precision, however, search marketing remains a
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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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