Elinor Mills and Stefanie Olsen are reporting a remarkable piece of news: Google is buying print-ad inventory and reselling it to AdWords advertisers. AdWords is essentially an ad-brokerage business, so that aspect isn't new. But Google brings unique technology and interfacing to AdWords advertisers, adding tremendous value to the equation—it is that value, primarily, that has made Google a rich public company. In this latest venture, in which Google purchased pages of ad space in PC Magazine and other publications, then resold slices of that space, it is difficult to see where added value from a high-tech company lies. In AdWords, Google matches advertiser with inventory by means of keywords, which are the value-adding hinges. It's all about search. In the reselling of magazine pages, it's all about … well, that's not clear, but one source in the CNET article mentions that Google is tracking results, providing 800 numbers for phone response, and monitoring online response to the ads. Number-crunching has to be part of this experiment somehow, and it'll be interesting to see what Google does with this.
1. To my mind this isn't much of a mystery! Inducing someone to phone an 800 number to get more information about an advert is virtually analgous to getting a web surfer to clicking on a Google ad (banner-shaped or otherwise).
By placing targeted ads (perhaps identically worded/formatted?) in both print and online media and examining the response rate of each, they can generate compelling comparative statistics about the effectiveness of print vs online advertising and use this information to sell their online ad services to potential advertisers. This is therefore likely to be a short-term experiment which will end abruptly when they have gathered enough statistical data to derive conclusive results. Doesn't that make sense?
Posted at 4:42AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Marcus Tucker