Search Experiential @ Toronto, Canada

Today the Toronto office hosted the Search Experiential. The Canadian office has approximately 40 people on the brand team so with each live experience our hope is that we keep attendance as high as possible (and I will fully admit that I used the Paul Polman picture that Noreen posted to lure the staff and say, "Hey if he can spend 30 minutes, hopefully you can too!").

Google & PHD set up a very professional display area with 5 main stations. Taking some learning from the EC experience, we made sure that the SEO and Paid search stations were at the front. We then had 3 other stations focussed on the web 2.0 search areas of video, mobile and contextual. The mobile search station was particularly popular because they brought in the G1 Android phones. It was announced this week that the Android will be available as of June in Canada so curiosity was piqued. The beauty and simplicity of search via mobile was made very clear to brand team members. I also uploaded google's latest addition to my blackberry: verbal search! So now I can perform a search without even typing! It feels very Star Trek to me!

Overall, my estimate is that 30 of the 40 brand people attended the event making it our most successful experiential to date!

One more to go: Chicago! Stay tuned!

Kristine