Saul Hansell has a thorough overview of Google’s ad ambitions in the Sunday New York Times. Hansell obviously spent a lot of time trying to peer into Google’s “black box” of advertising initiatives, and talked to quite a few insiders and observers to get a bead on where the meteoric advertising force might head.
My favorite quote is from Jeff Jarvis, who gives Google credit for helping to spawn the blogosphere with its Adsense for Content program.
“God bless Google,” said Mr. Jarvis, the BuzzMachine blogger. “They took the cooties off citizen media.” Until Google’s program came along, advertisers shied away from placing ads on individual user’s pages. But AdSense analyzed each page and tried - not always successfully - to find ads related to the page’s content.
One important point comes near the end of the piece. Google may indeed be moving beyond its superb engineering expertise into unknown territory if it tries to tackle television advertising.
“Advertising was not a business built by logic, and we don’t work by algorithm,” said Wenda Harris Millard, Yahoo’s chief sales officer. “Yes, we need to be more accountable, but that doesn’t mean you sacrifice art and creativity.” Mr. Schmidt acknowledges that as Google explores moving into television, it may well face a conflict between its core belief that advertising must be useful and the typical television commercial that is “based on feeling and emotion.”
Cynthia Brumfield at 10:42 PM|Comments(0)
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