Google talks display ad strategies, offerings
Google revealed details of its display advertising strategy in an educational webcast today, highlighting a three-pronged strategy for untangling some of the complexity within the advertising business.
In an online presentation, the company illustrated the changing media landscape - and its fragmentation - as people get their news, information and entertainment from multiple sources: television, online newspapers, blogs, gossip sites, Facebook, tweets and more.
For an advertiser to reach the right audience, it can no longer rely on the complex network of relationships between publishers, advertisers and ad networks, Google said.
Instead, it sees an approach that involves 1) simplifying the system for buying and selling ads, 2) providing the tools to measure performance and 3) opening the ecosystem to outside players who want to get in on the game.
The simplification part comes by essentially allowing Google to be the hub - the middle man, if you will - that handles everything from ad creation to running the marketplace where ad space is bought and sold to providing the network to serve those ads.
On the measurement side, Google talks about the power of the analytics, especially when you consider that different advertisers have different expectations from their display ads. The best way to provide that is to give them the tools that allows them to discover the information that's most valuable to them.
Finally, Google wants to open the ecosystem to outsiders. The company calls it the democratization of the system. The Double-Click Ad Exchange is the open market place where ad space can be bought and sold in an open market, allowing more players to get some prime exposure. It also highlighted the Display Ad Builder, which allows users to choose from some pre-made ad templates and build their own.
The ad game is changing as eyeballs scatter across old media and new media. Google - an advertising company posing as a search and Web company - is looking to take some of the complexity out of it and open it to a broader audience.
A replay of Google's webcast will be available at Google's investor relations page.