Greg Sterling at Search Engine Land posted an article today called Branding is Coming to Search in a Big Way. In the post, Greg talks about a comment he made at the SMX West Branding and Search panel that “search is more a branding medium than anything.”

While the comment was mainly designed to be provocative, and most search marketers might not think it is true, I can tell you that in the future, major industry keywords will be dominated by companies that are aiming to brand, not just drive traffic to their website.

As Greg points out, Yahoo! has been creating opportunities for advertisers (his example is Honda) to give a branded, multimedia experience in the search results for specific search terms. This makes a lot of sense when you look at the financial gains that can be made by selling impression based advertisements on your most popular search pages.

Let’s face it, Google and Yahoo! are in the position where they need to show some impressive and sustainable gains in revenue to keep shareholders happy. Grabbing a hold of the lucrative branding dollars that are out there (versus the direct response dollars) is a great way to do that. I mean, why do you think Google bought DoubleClick?

The great catalyst to all of this, in my opinion, will be the continued movement of advertising dollars and consumer’s time and attention from traditional media to the Internet. Eventually advertisers and the agencies they use will finally come to the realization that conducting an online campaigns can give their brand a lift and provide them with very detailed metrics about the effectiveness of their ads - all at a relatively low cost.

So props to Greg for stepping up and breaching the subject of search and its role in branding. I have a feeling if he made the same statement about search being a branding medium more than anything in ten years, everyone would look at him like he just stated that Everest is a big mountain.

Yeah - the duh face.