Google’s next big money trick
Twenty years ago, online advertising was a fledgling segment of the global advertising market. Fast forward to 2017 and the online advertising segment is poised to overtake television as the single largest segment of advertising expenditure. No single company has benefited more than Google from the rise of online advertising with its recent 2nd quarter 2017 financial results showing yet again its dominance of the online advertising market.
However while online advertising can be expected to continue a healthy growth, the rate of growth is slowing. Thus some pundits might ask, where to from here for Google and its parent company Alphabet, especially given its massive reliance on advertising dollars to drive revenue and profits.
Virtual reality or augmented reality?
Could virtual reality or augmented reality be the next big thing that will drive a new wave of revenue dollars for Google?
Perhaps … but not in the way most pundits expect!
You see, for the second time, Google is poised to transform a segment of the advertising market that will change it from its current state, to something practical, flexible and affordable to tens of millions of new customers across the globe.
Call it augmented reality if you wish, but just as quantum computing is heralding a return to analog computing after a fifty year dominance by digital devices, Google’s newest market will be grounded in the physical world, but one delivering context relevant advertising in physical locations at costs never before feasible.
Welcome to Google’s newest advertising platform
Welcome to Google’s newest advertising platform delivered via its fleet of autonomous vehicles on a road near you!
Having the ability to advertise products and services across towns and cities throughout the world using autonomous vehicles will usher in a new era of capabilities for Google to target localized contextual-relevant advertising to business large and small across the globe. Combining that capability with advertising via mobile devices will facilitate an advertising platform that no other company will be able to match in the foreseeable future.
Imagine for example that a small business in a suburban area will be able to login to a Google AdWords account and select a geographically area within which its advertising will be displayed, either via autonomous vehicles “driving” around the area, and/or via mobile devices within that geographical area. The advertisement could be a lunchtime special running today from 11am to 2pm and only displayed on autonomous vehicles within 2 kilometers of the business location.
Advertising could also be relevant based on the profiles of nearby drivers and pedestrians based on location information gathered from mobile phones, or information gleaned via machine learning algorithms analysis of nearby persons. Specific advertisements could also be triggered based on weather conditions, nearby events, traffic conditions, or pedestrian density. With the expanding application of machine learning to audio and visual analysis, there are a broad spectrum of “sensory” inputs that could be used to deliver customized advertising in a particular geographical area.
For example, using machine learning and vision recognition, the vehicle’s sensors detect a group of three teenage girls on the footpath. Combined with location and context data from mobile phones at that location, the platform predicts that the three girls are fans of Justin Bieber. After a few nanoseconds of computational gyrations, the autonomous vehicle platform is displaying sounds and images specifically relevant to Justin Bieber fans. Further down the road a group of football fans are streaming by on the roadside, an ideal target audience for that advertisement about a dinner special at a nearby restaurant.
Already Google’s Ad Words platform is the go-to platform for online advertising, but by extending the platform to seamlessly support both the physical and the online world, Google will be ideally positioned to expand its reach to businesses that are focused on selling products and services in a relatively small geographical area. The number of those businesses vastly exceeds those that are already advertising online.
Yes, not only will Google’s new AdWords platform assist ongoing growth of its advertising business, it will actually enable an even bigger untapped market segment of new advertisers for which localization is essential.
During the last twenty years, Google has led a transformation of the advertising industry. It is now set to lead it again, this time down a path that delivers advertising which seamlessly merges the physical and online worlds on a road near you.
[Disclosure: the author does not own any stocks of Alphabet. However he wishes he did.]
Photo used with permission of Ad Trans Inc
David Cartwright is a strategist and geek who has a deep interest in autonomous vehicles and the unexplored applications they are about to unleash. In November 2017 he will be presenting a conference paper on “Autonomous vehicles and Community Care Service Delivery” at the Australian Aged Care Industry IT Council Conference.
Twitter: @davidcartwright
