FORTUNE: Do you think we'll evolve beyond keywords? (The basis for every search today)SCHMIDT: Oh, very much so.
FORTUNE: To what?
SCHMIDT: Today, we buy and sell keywords, but what you really want to do is move to concepts or themes or groups or something. It's a difficult area because it's hard to automate that, but what we would like is we would like customers to be able to say, 'I'm in this industry, please help me.'
[fortune.com...] (quote is from third page)
Moving beyond keywords could bring about some interesting options for advertisers, and exactly how they would move beyond "buying and selling keywords". Not sure of logistics of how to make a change or an addition to Adwords as we know it with so many advertisers, but it is an interesting to know this is the direction Google would like to take.
Some advertisers are unskilled investors - they'll want to and need to buy themes or keyword groups.
Some advertisers are daytraders and consider themselves skilled - they'll want keywords and some themes.
Some advertisers are skilled investors - they'll want the largest, most relevant exact match keyword lists.
This is a system that Google is working on its currently in BETA, what it will be able to do is like you say Theme/Group things related to Advertiser sites. The system is actually really nice, you simply like you say tell what you’re about and then Google uses its years of referencing themes and groups technology to automatically put you in front of the right users. This system will really help the basic advertiser who doesn’t have the time and knowledge to build huge keyword lists. The only problem/down side to this is the possibility of affiliates to overcrowd everything on Adwords. This is also why Google is strongly looking at adopting the Overture structure of dealing with affiliates.
I know we hope that users can access this as it will bring more advertisers to Adwords and save time with the people who are running smaller client accounts.
