There's an interesting article over at Business Week today that tries to boil search engine advertising down to a hard line number-crunching skill that removes all need for creativity. It makes some valid points and does a great job of driving home the message that analytics are essential to the success of a search marketing campaign, but it really misses the boat when it comes to the big picture.

From the article:

In total, Khan bids on about 250,000 key words and phrases at the major search engines. Each one generates its own return on investment, and that number helps to determines Khan's bidding strategy. But there are plenty of other numbers to throw into the mix. "I get gigabytes of click data," he says. "Cost, cost per click, and keyword rank." The ranking of each of his quarter-million keywords fluctuates during the day as bidding continues. Khan's team takes the flow of numbers coming in from the search engines and marries them with internal data. How many visitors from each keyword visit the Web site? How many of them spend money, and how much money do they spend? With those numbers, Khan's automated system generates a return on investment for each keyword. Those help determine the bidding strategy. It's all based on numbers. And that's what Khan looks for when he recruits. "Marketing is still considered a soft skill," he says. "But there's a shift in focus from creative to analysis in marketing. When I go out and look for search marketers, I look for computer science and economics backgrounds. Investment bankers are good.

The problem is that it misses the entire idea that conversions can be dramatically impacted by things like ad text change, landing page change and page copy. In other words, things that require creativity.

The Business Week analogy is almost as ridiculous as the idea that TV ads bought during certain TV shows deliver impact at a certain rate, so it doesn't matter what the commercial actually says. I'm sure the folks at Volkswagon would argue that ad content can go a long way toward determining the impact of an ad.

The same holds true for search engine marketing. Studies have repeatedly shown that user testing of a web site followed up by changes inspired by the test results can double conversion rates. Doubling your conversion rates can have a significant impact on what you can afford to bid.

It's fine and dandy to point out that it's important to be running the number when it comes to determining your search marketing spend, but it's downright irresponsible to claim that the creativity has gone the way of the dodo.