This phrase from the dMarc FAQ page struck me as pretty Googlesque: “we bypass all human touch points and distribute spots directly to the station’s digital automation systems.”
This paragraph from dMarc’s “Networks” page shows what they can do in terms of targeting ads, but also underscores how far that targeting currently is from what Google does on the web:
Want to hit adults 18-54 in a particular market? Done. Want to run just a handful of different markets, with a different demo in each? Done. Pick your market, station format, demographic, and day parts, click a couple of buttons and your network is ready to run.
Erick Schonfeld at the Business 2.0 blog has some ideas how Google might bridge the gap between radio and its current advertising business:
Can Google use DMarc to serve contextual ads over the radio? Probably not terrestrial radio. But as radio goes digital, and you add in satellite and Internet radio, then things start to get interesting. Just by knowing what stations you listen to, more relevant ads can be served up to you.
Now take that logic one step further. If Google knows your stations and playlists, and can marry that with what it already knows about your search behavior and your clickstream throughout the Web (i.e., if it knows your idenity and can track it), then that information can be fed into an ad engine that serves up radio ads (or TV ads, for that matter), just as easily as it can serve up text ads.
Umair Haque at bubblegeneration also weighs in:
It shouldn’t come as a big shock that Google’s moving into radio ads. Now that Google’s built an edge competence in making ads and content plastic and liquid - essentially, in harnessing the power of markets and networks that underlie them - it is going to leverage this competence across as many media markets as it can, as fast as it can. You shouldn’t see Goog as the world’s information organizer. It’s more accurate to say that it’s the world’s ad allocator.
A commenter takes issue with Umair, saying “google has no success in running a business outside of keyword websearch/adwords…as for radio bolted into adsense, go spend some time with advertisers and see what they think.”
Umair responds that “the key…is that there are possibly millions of advertisers who aren’t using radio, but would, if Google made it easy for them. Sure, coca-cola may have no need to go through google for radio ad buys. But there might be 1,000 advertisers 1/1000 of the size of Coca Cola who will.”
Umair also compares Google to Yahoo in terms of their “edge competencies”:
Contrast Google with Yahoo. Yahoo doesn’t have any edge (or core) competencies; so it can’t leverage anything into new markets. Despite it’s huge, ongoing investment in the edge - Yahoo’s picked up most of the major edge players - it still, amazingly, hasn’t learned how to create value at the edge, and so all it’s edge investments are trapped in silos, because Yahoo’s afraid that touching them will devalue them. That’s a vicious circle: it would indeed mess them up…but only because Y doesn’t understand strategy at the edge.
Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Watch suggests it may be time for Google to add a few words (underline is mine)to its famous mission statement:
“Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” [r]eally ought to say “Google’s mission is to fund and organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
Mitch Shapiro at 10:44 PM|Comments(0)
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