Google's moves over the past few months have shown that the search engine's ambitions extend beyond the Internet. It hopes to offer advertising in traditional old media outlets: print, radio, and television. Will this actually work?
Google already makes many in the old media field tremble with fear. Book publishers and news agencies are suing the company for copyright infringement, even as some online news sites carry the search engine’s ads. But Google’s latest moves should really send a shiver down old media’s collective spine.
You see, Google didn’t invent search-fueled online advertising, but it did popularize it. In doing so, it created the biggest revolution in advertising in literally decades. Billions of advertising dollars now flow to search-based online advertising. Unfortunately for old media, these dollars don’t represent expanded advertising budgets so much as money being diverted away from other advertising venues…such as radio, television, and everything else we think of as old media. Old media has at least one thing in common with Google: it meets its budgets not by users paying for its content, but by advertisers paying to use its space. So the new advertising model hurts old media where it lives.
The key to the new advertising model is that the online ads run near search results, when people are looking for what the advertiser is offering. Plus, thanks to technology that tracks this information, advertisers only pay when someone actually views the ad, or even when someone clicks on it. This may seem like old hat to SEOs now, but this kind of accountability is literally impossible with older media. John Heilemann, writing about a related topic recently, observed that “Madison Avenue [is] in a state of panic over Google’s reinvention of advertising as a science driven by algorithms instead of an art propelled by (ahem) ‘creativity.’”
They’re right to be afraid. Anyone who has been watching knows that Google will not limit itself to the online world—which would be bad enough for an industry dependent on advertising. The search engine is already working to extend its advertising model into old media’s turf. That’s a cause for fear, but also for opportunity. Because, ironically enough, if old media companies are prepared to think outside the box, these ventures could actually save them.
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