Much of the credit, of course, can be given to David Verklin, who has served at the helm of Carat Americas since its inception in the late 90s. Today, the company’s CEO oversees a marketing stronghold that’s comprised of over a half-dozen specialized agencies, which run the gamut from word-of-mouth to SEM to creative–iProspect, Molecular and Freestyle to name a few. With such a lofty position, it’s understandable that Verklin’s time is limited.

But on the cusp of Ad Week, he was more than willing to share a lengthy, engaging chat with ADOTAS about his background, the Carat strategy and its significance, his panel discussion on gaming at the MIXX Expo, and how prevalent a role interactive now plays in Ad Week 2006.

Hi, David. So tell me a little bit about your background beginning before Carat.

I took over as managing director in 1993 of Hal Riney & Partners. We took that from a small San Francisco office to one of the largest, privately-held agencies in the United States. In 1998, we sold that agency to Publicis. When we sold it, it just turned out that Aegis Group, which is Carat’s parent company, approached me almost at the same time in the late 90s, to [run] Carat in the United States.

In the late 90s, Carat was a huge brand in Europe and it continues to be the largest buyer of advertising time and space in Europe. So it was a large European media buying and planning independent, but it did not have operations in Asia and North America. We were not global. When you are as big as we are in Europe—we buy $13 billion worth of media just in Europe, and the next closest player may do $8 billion—one view was could we continue to grow when you’re that dominant. And the second trend they saw, I think, was globalization. So they asked me to launch Carat in the United States.

In terms of your experience and background, was this a big change for your career?

If you remember my background, the reason I ended up at Aegis was that I started in the media business. I had a dream of going from the media side of the business to general management, to running an agency. That’s an unusual path. Most people who run agencies either come from the creative side of the business or the account management side of the business. So when Aegis Group was looking for a media executive with general agency management experience in the late 90s, there weren’t a whole lot of names on that list. That’s how they found me.

As a media guy, I was very familiar with Carat, and I thought creating a freestanding media services company in the United States in the late 90s was a pretty big opportunity. Hal Riney had just been sold, so I was ready for a new challenge. So that’s how I came here.

The Council’s objective is to establish a forum for advertising industry leaders to discuss Pay-Per-Click quality issues and to ensure their interests and those of the 2,500 members in the Click Fraud Network are represented in the development of PPC measurement standards.

“The absence of pay-per-click quality standards is the single largest barrier for large advertisers to expand their media buying strategies on search engines and contextual networks alike,” said Robert Pettee, Senior Search Marketing Manager for LendingTree.

“As an industry, we must define click fraud before we solve it,” added Jason Clement of Carat Fusion. “This is why we are pleased to say that we will be participating in the CQC and adding an advertiser’s perspective to discussions about this growing problem.”

Members of the CQC will convene quarterly to discuss click quality control issues as well as recent industry developments. During the meetings, Council participants will provide input and feedback on processes and concerns related to the development of click quality measurement standards. The Council will then prioritize feedback, which will be relayed to the IAB’s Click Measurement Working Group among other standards bodies

A crowd of 100+ interactive advertising cognoscenti huddled into the intimate 26+ Helen Mills Theater in Manhattan’s Chelsea district last Thursday to think “Outside the Funnel” in the realm of search. “We’ve seen so much great work out there from our agency partners, around thinking about search — not in the historical, direct marketing, ROI-focused medium — but in much more creative and strategic ways,” Ron Belanger, Yahoo’s Senior Director of Advertiser Strategies and Summit co-host, told me before the event. “We said ‘wouldn’t it be neat to share these ideas and have an event that would highlight these [creatives].’”

In turn, executives from top brands such as American Express, Starwood Hotels, and Verizon, in addition to leading agencies including iCrossing, Ogilvy, and Saatchi & Saatchi congregated to celebrate creative uses of search in the media mix and witness the presentation of the first ever Search Light Award. “Historically, search has been very direct response-focused, very tactical, and not strategic,” Belanger explained. “It was lower funnel. So we said, ‘you know what? We think that there are a lot of good executions that are very strategic.’”

As a result, the Yahoo Search team brainstormed the first-ever Search Light Award, the four finalists of which were determined by an internal team of Yahoo PR, strategy, sales and marketing folks. The finalists themselves were chosen because of their ability to successfully tie customer search intent, keyword use, and creative. “We didn’t know what to expect, whether we’d get two or four or six submissions,” Belanger said. “We ended up getting over 25 submissions’ worth, and most of them are really strategic and creative.”

Out of the 25+ entries, the four lucky agency partners who made the cut into Search Light finals were Agency.com and their “Miller Beer Run” Super Bowl spots, Avenue A | Razorfish’s “Chase Loves the Double” campaign, GM Planworks’ “Fastlane/Lutz” spots and RPA’s “Honda Element” creative.

Representatives from each of the four finalists presented specific elements of their campaign, including the strategy and the eventual success of their promotion. As a twist, Yahoo not only invited three esteemed media panelists to critique and analyze the event – including Business Week columnist Jon Fine and AdWeek interactive scribe Brian Morrissey — but in true American Idol fashion, the audience got to vote for their favorite via keypad.

But before the competitors were to be praised (or skewered) by the panel, Yahoo kicked off the Search Light Awards with an intriguing 35-minute keynote speech from Carat North Americas CEO David Verklin. Verklin emphasized that “search will become ubiquitous,” adding that the concept of “search” already had moved beyond the notion of searching the Web: Tivo, he said, is “a search engine for television,” while GPS is a form of search for car. Verklin, who based his central theme around asking the audience repeatedly “what’s your perfect future”, said his was that “the strategy for any client is focused on driving prospective customers to a Web site first.” From said website, consumers were then able to browse, make a purchase, contact customer service, or find a brick-and-mortar location.

Yahoo’s Belanger praised Verklin as the ideal choice for a keynote, considering his experience in the old and new arenas of advertising. “We talk a lot in the media about the ‘old guard’ and the new digital [marketers] that are taking over,” he says. “David is one of those rare marketing executives who grew up in traditional media and is so embracing, supportive and strategic about interactive. It’s really leaders like him that have credibility in the traditional space, and have the knowledge and day-to-day understanding of our world.”

Once the competition officially got underway, reps from all the agencies involved boasted their strategies to search success. Many of those involved tied theirs to a strategy that involved purchasing low-cost keywords specifically related to TV ads. Some like Agency.com used online gaming that would abide by the theme of their TV spots.

But the audience favorite, and first Search Light winner, was RPA with their “Honda Element: How to Act Like a Different Animal” campaign. RPA’s associate media director Mike Margolin discussed the Honda Element search campaign, which played off animated TV spots that featured animals interacting with the automobile. The agency then purchased the names of those animals as keywords–platypus, possum, and the like–and the sponsored links drove people to a site where they could view extended versions of the TV ads.

RPA (above, pictured with Ron Belanger, left), in general sought to match in search ad copy with the overall tone of its brand creative advertising. The Santa Monica-based agency reported that 40 percent of all referrals generated by this project resulted from the search advertising campaign. In addition, a branding study showed that the search ads helped generate significant lifts for the target audience in awareness, brand favorability, and purchase intent.

If anything, the Search Light Awards proved that search marketing can coexist with creative as well as the offline world. Belanger told me prior to the event that he hoped the attendees would come away from the event thinking differently. “At the end of the day, what we really hope is to stimulate thought. We want account directors, media buyers, media planners and even creative directors here today walking away from this thinking about search a little differently — thinking about it as a reach vehicle, as a way to interact with very interested consumers who may not be in the buy-now mode, but maybe higher up in the funnel.”

He added, “It’s intersecting the points of search intent and offline media, and it seems like a big first step of many. Hopefully, we’ll see over the years, the innovation in this area will become a lot more strategic and innovative in what marketers are doing.”