The Googlization of the Advertising Market

Google is the leading worldwide sales rep in number of clients and in turnover. The first one to be deliberately worldwide (cf. the language and transliteration tools, the number of languages covered, and so on). Any major resistance comes from a Chinese search engine (Baidu, 百度). Nobody can avoid Google anymore.

Google’s most important impact is indirect. Adsense and Adwords are training advertisers and sales forces to acquire new professional habits while buying keywords, optimizing websites for search (SEO), analyzing traffic, landing pages, quality scores, PageRank … Moreover, Google ergonomics, user interfaces, vocabulary, etc. permeate our culture. Google has become a “habit-forming force”, building a habitus (“principle that regulates the acts”), which in turn paves the way to generating mindsets and actions that conform to Google’s grammar (sort of affordances or "action possibilities"). Planners and buyers employ the same modus operandi when using the numerous Google tools (Maps, Apps, Docs, YouTube, Search, Gmail, android, etc.).

We now all speak “google” more or less fluently.

Then comes the Google syllogism:

• Internet is the model for all digital media

• All media are becoming digital (switchover)

Ergo …

What works for the net will sooner or later work for all media.

The digital advertising market is based on two main principles: automatization of the advertising chain (creation, planning, buying, adserving, analyzing) and self-service. All of this is nothing but the reduction of transaction costs (cf. R.H. Coase about the emergence of the very small firm, and about barter). It translates into an ad market place (auction-based, no more rate card) and opens the advertising market to a wide number of new advertisers: small, hyper-local, niche companies and SMEs (the “long tail”). Almost no barrier at the entry: pros and amateurs (Pro-Ams) can come to the market.

So it should be no surprise that Google tests the water by joining the American ad market for print, radio and TV. Europe is probably next. And the Mobile Internet. Same tools, same methods, same reasoning. A new generation of planners and buyers, Internet geeks, Web 2.0 aces: all Google natives accomplish the mutation from the GRP culture to Internet culture: it is less about reach and frequency, more about interaction, call to action, behavioral targeting …

Should we worry? Should we start a conservative crusade against Google? We could, but it would be hopeless since it is not just about Google; it is about the Internet and we cannot fight the Internet. Instead, let's take advantage of what Google has done and reinvent the advertising profession.

About these concepts see Erwin Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism, 1951 and the Postface of the French translation by Pierre Bourdieu, 1967; see also Noam Chomsky, Aspects of the theory of syntax, 1965 and James J. Gibson, The Theory of Affordances, 1977.

(Some of these ideas were presented at the EGTA conference in Dublin for European Television and Radio Sales Houses, May 30, 2008).