What Would Google Do_ - Jeff Jarvis [76]
Advertising
And now, a word from Google’s sponsors
And now, a word from Google’s sponsors
Earlier, I argued that marketers’ ultimate goal should be to eliminate advertising by improving their products and relationships instead. Consumers should be so lucky. Media companies supported by advertising should pray this never happens.
Media’s prayers will be answered. We’ll always have advertising and ad agencies because companies will never reach the nirvana of creating perfect products that every customer loves and sells for them. Marketers will still want to introduce new products and to envelop what they sell in the smoke-and-mirrors of premium brands.
In a sense, Google has changed advertising more than any industry I cover here. Google is in the ad business. It revolutionized the ad economy, enabling marketers to pay for performance rather than space, time, and eyeballs. It invented new means of targeting ads, making them newly efficient. It opened up millions more places to put ads, ending media scarcity. It attracted countless new advertisers. It dominates not only search ads but now web banner ads, and it has started selling ads in print and broadcast.
Yet for all the upheaval Google has brought to the advertising economy, ad agencies remain largely unchanged. That’s because agencies still control the money, and nobody wants to mess with the guy who has the credit card. But their Google immunity will expire.
Rishad Tobaccowala, chief innovation officer of Publicis Groupe Media, started Denuo, a think-tank and laboratory inside his company, in an effort to create the next-generation agency. Asked what Google teaches him for this task, he counted five lessons.
First: Focus on talent. “Google feels like it was invented yesterday and it’s a 10-year-old company already,” he said. “AOL’s a grandfather.” Agencies are supposed to be fresh and young but Tobaccowala said they act old thanks to the “death grip” of years-long relationships among executives and clients. “Google would have talent running the place versus tenure.”
Second: Newness. “In the service business,” Tobaccowala said, “you take the form of the people you work for. If you really want to change, you need to get a new breed of clients.” Google did that by creating a marketplace to serve the long-tail advertiser before the behemoths, “people who didn’t think about advertising, who had no agency.” They brought no rules, so they played by Google’s rules.
Third: Data. Advertisers love data almost as much as Google does. They think it tells them where to spend their money and the return on investment they get. For decades, advertisers accepted dubious measurements of magazine readership (which assume that every allegedly well-worn copy is passed around to large groups) and broadcast audiences (surely they can’t believe the Nielsen ratings). Then along came the most measurable medium in history, the internet, where advertisers can learn more about customers than ever before.
Fourth: Make money through the side door. “Google—and Apple—make money by giving a key part of their business away for free and then making money on something else.” Too often, companies think that everything they do has value they must capture, charge for, monetize, preserve, restrict, and protect. Instead, the real value may come from the side.
Fifth: To quote Google’s own No. 1 rule, “Focus on the user and all else will follow.” Australian ad executive Peter Biggs spoke for much of his industry when he told ABC Radio National’s The Media Report: “It’s a consumer-driven business, but they are not our most important audience. Our most important audience is our clients, and their brands.” Tobaccowala says the opposite. “Our fixation should not be on our clients. It should be on the people