Google Puts the Scare in Media Buyers

CNET has speculation on Google's continued quest for world domination of all things ad related. The talk comes on the heels of almost carbon copy articles that appeared over the weekend in The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal pushed forth the idea of Google's move into the world of brokering all types of advertising, not just Internet related ads.

From CNET:

While Google's ambitions haven't exactly been a secret, the appearance of two stories--as well as Google's willingness to talk publicly about its plans--fueled suspicion in the minds of some bloggers. Was this Google's way of giving a heads-up to the advertising industry that the game is on?

Mainstream advertising agencies are still just warming up to Google as a media outlet. Long-relegated to dealing with search marketing specialists, it's only been in the past year or two that online ad outlets like Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing have started to make solid inroads with the more traditional advertising agencies that specialize in high end television and print commercials.

From The New York Times article:

More quietly, Google is also preparing to disrupt the advertising business itself, by replacing creative salesmanship with cold number-crunching. Its premise so far is that advertising is most effective when seen only by people who are interested in what's for sale, based on what they are searching for or reading about on the Web.

The media and advertising industries certainly see a future in which television ads are aimed at individual viewers. But few outside of the engineering doctoral degrees at Google think that television ads should simply be utilitarian, rather than entertaining, provocative or annoyingly repetitive--the models that have worked so far. And some media industry executives wonder whether Google, which has already become the most powerful force in Internet advertising, should also become the clearinghouse for ads of all types--a kind of advertising Nasdaq.

I may be the only one, but it feels like the article is doing a grand job of sweeping aside the road blocks that Google will have to navigate past in order to setup this new utopian system of mass-advertising management. Google's model works well online because they are able to setup a direct-response medium that feeds ads to users based on the users actions. It's a lot more difficult to pull this off with things like magazine ads, billboards or even television. Sure you can target your content to some extent, but it's just not the same.

From the Wall Street Journal article:

Seeing an opportunity to expand that expertise into traditional media, Google in recent months has purchased ad pages in two technology magazines and made the space available to some of its advertisers. Google has also indicated that it is thinking about extending its ad-placement services to other areas, possibly including TV.

But it is likely that any Google system will provide tools to make it easier for advertisers to target a susceptible audience and track the ads' performance, as Google's online ads have done. One possibility: a system of counting the phone calls to toll-free-response numbers featured in Google-placed print ads. That way, advertisers could gauge the success of their ads and Google could charge advertisers only for each response they get -- as it does online.

As I see it, that second paragraph is the thing to really take notice of. The reason that Google is able to dominate so solidly online is because users have so much control over who sees their ad and can fine-tune their ad spend accordingly. This isn't going to be an option in more traditional forms of advertising. Unless Google has some magical way of changing which ads appear on a page by optical scan of a reader...and I don't think they've got that technology in place just yet...

While I think it's possible that Google could establish a dominance in future media spaces like those that will be offered alongside DVR and Tivo style systems, I'm just not sure I buy the idea that Google can walk in and change up traditional advertising mediums that have been in place for decades. At least not changing it up in a big enough way that they can actually threaten the jobs of traditional media buyers.

There's a big difference between creating something new that works and changing up something that already works to make it better. Just because they've done the former doesn't mean they can do the latter.