The Eventual Merging of the Online and Offline Advertising Worlds

Google’s attempts to evolve its advertising offering from the online into the offline worlds got a promising review in the New York Times. The short version of what’s going on is that Google is taking its online targeting ability, enhanced by technology, and trying to evolve it into the advertising world of traditional media.

One frontier is traditional radio, otherwise known as terrestrial radio (because  of the various new kinds like web-based radio and satellite radio). The Times piece interviews some of the early clients in the experiments and shows that they are encouraged that is seems to be working, thought the jury is still out. There is also a lot of worry from the traditional players and some legitimate concerns about whether it will ultimately work in a significant way.

Another frontier is the newspaper world, and those experiments seem to be going even better than radio. That makes sense because newspapers are text based and more fully integrated into the online world anyhow. But it’s interesting to see many of the top papers and chains talking about how it seems to be working.

The final frontier is the biggest one, television. Here’s one paragraph that gives you the sense of what is at stake:

Television advertising could prove particularly fruitful for Google, because the company might be able to combine its technology with that of cable systems to show different ads to different viewers based on demographics or personal interests. The company has said it is conducting a small trial with a few partners.

The point for politics is that all of the traditional broadcast media are evolving to take on more of the targeting capabilities of online advertising. This might take a long while to transition, but the trend is taking shape.

This is a good thing for those political people who take advantage early. It will allow you to use more effective, less expensive advertising to reach the people you need to reach.

Peter Leyden