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Ed Stevenson, GroupM's new operations director for search, cheerfully admits he is at "the very geeky end of search". With an impressively technical knowledge of "data warehousing", "onsite analytics" and "double-bit enabling", it is easy to see why GroupM has given the 31-year-old New Zealander the responsibility of making the buying giant the dominant player in the UK's £1.6bn search market.

Stevenson, former managing director of search agency 24/7 Real Media, moved to GroupM following WPP's acquisition of the company in May 2007, before being promoted to his current position this March. WPP has since splintered off 24/7's search services business and incorporated it into GroupM, whose total UK search billings are expected to end up at just over £100m this year.

Reporting to David Kyffin, GroupM's managing director for digital and direct marketing, Stevenson's remit is to build a central search team for GroupM agencies, promoting technology and developing a model for best practice. The central team will be housed under the Outrider brand, a specialist search agency in WPP's overseas markets, and is intended as "back up" for the existing search teams at MediaCom and MediaCom North, Mediaedge:cia, MindShare and BJK&E.

Stevenson explains: "GroupM already has five very successful search agencies in their own right. We are looking to build a best practice model for the GroupM agencies - but then the other teams will put their own individual flavour on it."

Outrider expansion
GroupM's Outrider division is a team of four, but Stevenson, who is supported in his GroupM responsibilities by operations coordinator Lara Simitci, is in the process of hiring more account-facing staff, with ambitions to expand the Outrider team to about 15 people by the end of the year.

Another goal for 2008 is to have "a fully functioning Outrider brand" for three products. These are the shopping and data solutions service, which launched on 1 April; search engine optimisation (SEO), to be built by acquisition and launched in Q3, and onsite analytics, to launch by the end of the year. The analytics service will help clients understand customer flow through websites and where drop-off occurs.

Stevenson will also work closely with 24/7 Real Media to develop its Decide DNA search technology, which will be gradually rolled out to the GroupM agencies as the main search marketing vehicle throughout the group. The benefit of the tool, which covers 27 million keywords in 14 different languages, is that it will reduce planners' processing time and allow them to spend more time on strategy.

Stevenson explains: "Whether a keyword has lots of traffic is irrelevant if it doesn't actually work for that particular customer, and being able to give a fundamental answer to that takes a lot of technology and lot of data. Technology feeds back better information and helps the account manager make better decisions."

The explosive growth in search over the past few years, according to Stevenson, has been "catch-up" expansion, in response to existing demand. With marketing spend still being adjusted to make sure it is picking up every available opportunity within the search engines, the search market has not yet reached saturation point.

However, when it does, then search will become "a catching net", according to Stevenson. He explains: "Search will get to a point where people can understand what every single term people are typing into the search engines means to them, and then they can have a technology that decides whether people should be bidding on that or not. Advertisers can make sure they are absolutely everywhere, in every form - and then search becomes like a net, and you can catch everyone."

Driving searches
Developments in search will also enable campaigns in other media such as television to be completely targeted to drive searches online. Stevenson cites the car insurance slogan "Quote Me Happy", which has become a common search term, as a "classic example" of how an offline campaign can affect advertisers online. He is intrigued by "cookie-based targeting" - as pioneered by the US firm AdKnowledge - which is associating a cookie with e-mail and mobile numbers.

However, search still has hurdles to overcome, such as the skills shortage in the industry and the lack of proper integration between display and search. "Integration is becoming far more important," Stevenson says. "The days of looking at search in isolation to display or affiliate or SEO are almost gone already and the traditional stand-alone search agencies are few and far between.

"Once we get to the stage where search is about more than just bid management, search moves into a whole different cycle, and that is when it fits back in with everything else. The moves GroupM are making will put us in an extremely good position to be able to move search back to a centralised function."

CV
2008 Operations director, search, GroupM
2004 Director of search then managing director, 24/7 Real Media
1999 Sales manager, Nomadic Display
1996 Operations team leader, ANZ Banking Group