With search expected to help online adspend exceed outdoor advertising within the next nine months, Guy Phillipson, chief executive of the IAB, advises media planners and buyers to buckle down and learn the discipline, regardless of the advertiser's product or service, according to Haymarket's Media Week (via MediaBuyerPlanner). But a great gap still exists in media professionals' knowledge about buying and planning search.

According to digital agency I-Level, recruitment of media specialists in that area has been tough. Hiring for search positions from outside the media industry - in areas such as banking or data analytics - is becoming increasingly common.

But Karl Gregory, head of marketing at Yahoo, contends that search isn't difficult to buy and urges media professionals not to be over-awed by talk of metric tools and marketing doublespeak.

Media agency groups that have the most success with search may be those who focus on building relationships with the search engines. In fact, says Richard Firminger, media agencies "just need relationships with Google and Overture [Yahoo] and they're pretty much sorted."