'Google Speak' on CEO's vision of in-car, GPS-based personalized radio ads
Last week, while addressing publishing executives over lunch in NYC, Google CEO Eric Schmidt spoke about the day, within one to two years, that an in-car radio ad would personally direct him to turn at an upcoming clothing store to purchase the pair of pants he lacked.
Given that the U.S. radio advertising market is projected at $24 billion for 2009, and also that Google acquired dMarc Broadcasting, which "brings greater ROI to radio advertising," for a projected $1.13 billion last January, I concluded that Google is aiming to develop a GPS location-based highly targeted and personalized advertising product for in-car ad serving.
As Google VP of Advertising Sales Tim Armstrong has published a personal letter on the homepage of dMarc stating, “Google plans to extend targeted, measurable advertising to the broadcast space. In fact, even as you read this, our engineers and executives are working to seamlessly integrate dMarc’s technologies and operations to offer AdWords advertisers a broad suite of digital broadcast options,” I contacted Google to ask Armstrong about the status of Google’s integration of dMarc and to learn more about how soon Eric will be hearing a reminder that he needs a pair of pants while driving (while being chauffeured?).
Four days and several e-mails and telephone calls later, I received a Google response. The “Google Speak” I received from Google Corporate Communications was similar to the Google Speak an analyst received from Eric Schmidt when he asked at Google’s recent investor conference call, “We recently did a report looking at your job postings. It appears that there are quite a few job postings out there, more than double the same type of openings last year. Is it correct to think that you’re going to be hiring considerably more people this year than last year?”:
Schmidt: While I admire your data mining capability with respect to our job postings, the job postings do not directly and 100% correlate with the people we are actually hiring. We hire the person, not the job at Google. While we certainly do have reps and we certainly look for these kinds of positions, we really have an approach of hiring the best and the brightest in every field globally. We will modify our practices as we come across those people.
So it turns out that job postings are not a predictor, if you will, of what we’re going to do in the future. Think of them as a marketing program to attract people to apply, but then they go through a more private and internal process. Our hiring continues apace.
Just as Eric Schmidt told investors to not necessarily infer anything from the company’s help wanted notices, Google Corporate Communications told me to not necessarily infer anything from Eric Schmidt’s statement to NYC publishing executives that he hopes personalized GPS-enabled radio advertising will be serving targeted Google style highly relevant ads, in-car, within the next one to two years.