Adding Ads to Adwords

I recently visited Adwords for the first time in awhile and was struck by a glaring omission, there are no ads in Adwords. Why not? It seems like an ideal place to let businesses advertise to other businesses. I know companies are leery of selling access to their customers but I think it would land differently on an admin dashboards. A dashboard for advertising no less!

When I was running Dispatch.tv I would reach out to sites with whom we had customers in common — Yelp, Houzz, YP etc. I asked all of them if there was an opportunity to advertise to their customers, e.g. sponsoring the admin dashboard, or listing our service/deal in a marketplace. My questions were greeted with total confusion each time. Advertising is their main revenue stream and each of these sites has a slew of options that allow you to reach their visitors, but none that allow you to reach their customers. Why? It seems like a no brainer to me. B2B online advertising is challenging and these admin/customer dashboards seem like low hanging fruit.

Prediction: I bet Google is the first to experiment with monetizing this valuable real estate.