Advertising Age's Search Marketing Fact Pack 2006

Advertising Age's handy Fact Packs have become staples in my cache of media industry data. You may be familiar with their Advertising & Marketing Fact Packs and more recently the Hispanic Fact Pack (Annual Guide to Hispanic Advertising & Marketing), but now there's a new one: Search Marketing Fact Pack 2006 , 52 pages of data about search-engine marketing. Since about 80% of internet traffic begins at a search engine according to Harris Interactive, no wonder Advertising Age has compiled its first comprehensive Fact Pack devoted to search marketing. The Fact Pack provides data on search engines, sites, and keywords (for instance: a table of top search terms driving traffic to Youtube.com posts "steve irwin death video" at number 1). I take great heart from something I observed in a table of the top 50 (non-porn) searches. Hitwise reports that for four weeks in September 2006, along with the usual suspects of Myspace at number 1 and Ebay, Yahoo and Mapquest close behind, "lyrics" comes in at number 13. I read this as the the culture's underrated interest in poetry (since that's what lyrics are, good or bad). Searches for 'lyrics" are above Walmart and Bank of America and even match. com. "To say you can turn off television is arrogance," George Gerbner said in 1990. "People would rather stop breathing than stop storytelling." And right up there with storytelling is our need for (as revealed by what we search for) the lyrical!