Google Brings a Taste of Online to Traditional Media

We’ve long known Google to be on a path toward facilitating media buys across a cluster of offline traditional media. A clearer glimpse into this vision was given yesterday by Meredith Papp, product marketing manager at Google, during TKG’s session at SES.

Papp, who works for the division that handles traditional media advertising strategies, presented a few of the ways the company will be a one-stop shop for online and offline media buys. This ongoing strategy will essentially tie together moves made by the company in radio (AudioAds), television (Google TV), newspapers (newspaper pilot program) and magazines (remnant ad placements).

Using AdWords as a central hub, users will be able to manage all these campaigns together (along with paid search), and see how they affect each other, as well as online traffic and click performance. With some of the aforementioned media efforts, the company has also gained the capability to produce spots for television and radio.

Google TV could be huge for all the reasons we’ve examined around the growth and lowered barriers for SMB video, combined with Google’s reach and brand strength. And radio has lots of promise for Google, initiated through its acquisition of dMarc and enhanced by its agreement to resell Clear Channel radio inventory. Looking forward, radio ads could also have lots of synergies with any future Goog-411 monetization efforts, which will similarly use audio ads.

One example given by Papp involved the ability for an advertiser to produce a radio ad and target various geographies, demographics, etc., using the AdWords dashboard. But the neat part was this particular advertiser’s (outdoor clothing company) ability to determine that its ad automatically run when the temperature reaches below a predefined level.

There will be lots of examples like this for dynamic ad placement. This could be a powerful proposition for many local and national advertisers that want not only to diversify their ad campaign across different online and offline media, but also to have a much greater ability than ever before to manage and track campaigns all in one place.
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Side note: It’s looking more and more like Spot Runner should be an acquisition target for Google in its growing agency-like role with video production and distribution across many media and its direct sales efforts. The price tag is getting higher though — especially after the company’s recent $51 million funding round.