Loading ...One of the reasons why Google is so successful at Adwords, and not so successful at Adsense, is that the context in which advertising is placed is extremely important. When people are looking, they also look at ads and click on them if they seem relevant. If someone is reading an interesting news article, it might be less so.
Newspapers have discovered this long back, and classifieds are the most profitable piece of the newspapers’ business (more than display ads, which require an ad/edit ratio).
Would be interesting to identify other contexts in which advertising can be effective… could be a billion dollar problem.
Very good topic!
The problem, as I see it, is this: Public Relations firms have polluted the world with irrelevant marketing messages. This saturation and abuse of the human psyche has come about because traditional marketers do little else than first, fumigate the public with their messages and then, hope they score with these blanket-bombing campaigns.
The end results, of course, is the world we live in. Walk through your average CBD and what one sees is a place plastered with marketing graffiti.
The solution to all this, and the promise to clear the world of irrelevant marketing messages, is just starting to be explored, there is a huge way to go but we’ll get there.
In a variety of instances, such as an elderly couple watching TV, a single mother browsing her local supermarket, or a college student browsing a library, over the next few years we are going to see some very clever ways of getting the right message, to the right person and doing- at the right time.
Interesting insights from both of you. As a marketing communications professional, I beg to differ and perhaps, therein lies the nub- the medium is the message.
What works for Google doesn’t work for everyone else. Otherwise, why would portals charge a premium for shoshkele’s ( those irritating things that launch themselves across the mainpage and then become a skyscraper on the side) or pop-unders. The premise of Google adwords is based on search- a human behaviour that means I’m looking! that’s almost permission marketing- I want to be open to messages from others who may have stuff that I’m looking for. But TV, Outdoors, print display ads, are based on the premise that I can be interrupted ( and hence, the entire business of interruption marketing- today’s advertising). Which works better?
On a rational level, permission works esp. when I’m evaluating cars or gizmos and want to know more about the HP or the processor speeds, when am close to a buy decision.Hence Google’s success!
On an emotional level, where I like thinking of my pot-bellied middle-aged self behind the wheels of a 450CLK Merc with the wind in my non-existant hair, that’s where interrupt ads work.. and very well at last count!
Marketers and brand managers know this and are permanently looking for innovative ways of getting that “wow that could be me” response from prospects who would ultimately be consumers. And hence, more money is spent on creative treatment of interrupt ads. And finally, let’s not kid ourselves, even a brand like Google with hardly any visible ad spend, but very strong PR and viral marketing campaigns, exists only in our mind.
The ad words (that google tries to push and make money) sometimes doesnt make sense at all. This is something like trying to sell comb to a bald guy!!! The ad like this loses charm when it shows up as it catches the attention of bald guy’s. So a better way is to profile a person and not leak this informations out to desperate sales people. If one can log in favourites info, profile of the user who is browsing then a lot could be done in processing this info and passing on relavent ads at the user end. This would sound rather efficient to all levels right from advertisers, google and the user…
Mukund
Jay, so far, we have not had an alternative to mass advertising. The context and targeting are distinct from form (text versus impact) — Google has been successful due to great context (looking for info) — sure, if they can improve the context, that would be good too. In fact, I saw some articles on how Google like technology can come on TVs with settop boxes.
Mukund, last quarter Google did 1.5 billion in revenues… clearly it works. The control of how to use this targeting is still in advertisers’ hands, so if they want to sell a comb to a bald guy, thats their choice — atleast they have the ability to target.
Google’s major revenue is ads, i agree that it made quite a heft amount. But there are people who are misusing this. The misuse is this, i have seen the google ads on sites which have a kind of affiliation or commission based revenue share with different sites. An example is one such site which provides pirated movies, yes , a new movie is released quite fast on the net. There are many sites which are getting into this piracy thing and to recover the costs of maintaining website, bandwidth costs and making few bucks, these people sign up with google to list the ads on them. Now these sites get paid by google only if the ads listed are clicked. Now the strategy for these pirates is to force members and users who want to watch movies to click on the ads frequently. This way it covers their server costs, bandwidth costs etc etc. There has been few complaints by people who list ads on google. These complaints are like there were many clicks on the ads but no one bothered to stay at the page for a long time or no one bothered to look at what the advertiser is selling. But google charged these people as the links were clicked.
So not all the revenue google made through ads listing were from genuine clicks. Its become a kind of cheating or fraud. Secondly what is getting that much revenue from ads is the brand name Google. Again i may be wrong on this.
Mukund’s problem of dealing with false clicks is true and one of the reasons for Google’s success is that it has a reasonable way of filtering false clicks from genuine ones. This is a key thing in designing for the Internet. There will be leakages and misuse so it will never be 100% perfect but it will be good enough.
I think the area that is dying fast is print classifieds. Rupert Murdoch says that in most markets he has yet to see a person under 30 who looks at print classifieds any more.
yes i agree with you , sanjay. Print classified is fewer now a days and one of the main reason may be computer+ internet being a part of daily routine, gone are the days when people would take time to read each article and things on newspaper. when you need to search for a certain classified one needs to surf through all the pages of print media…but its rather fast using google. Only thing google cannot search is our brain haha, that would be surely a winning technology when one needs to just use google to search our brain and get things faster
The false click problem would be solved if the revenues are based on leads generated and not on clicks. There can be ways to track whether a click got convertd to a lead. It’s similar to trend where people pay for service or usage (e.g. what MS proposed in softwares) and not for ownership.
Just following the post (Interesting read indeed!) Google has already sued a company for false adclicks, read on…
Google has sued an Internet marketing firm that it says used false advertising clicks to defraud Google’s pay-per-click advertising system. The case against Auctions Expert International is one of the first involving click fraud.
Complete story at:
http://business.newsfactor.com/story.xhtml?story_title=Google-Sues-Over-Click-Fraud&story_id=28609&category=ecommerce