Is Google Making Us Better Marketers ?
I just got done reading an article in Ad Age entitled “Google Pricing System Plagues Players Like P&G”. One of the main tenets of the article is, due to the fact that Google’s pricing model was not set up for advertisers to achieve economies of scale, large CPG’s cannot achieve the same type of competitive advantage when buying media from Google and other search engines.
This article also speaks of the branding effect of search engines. Impressions on search engines are still not considered valuable to many marketers, but the ones that do consider impressions valuable (I am included in this camp from time to time) sometimes find themselves in a bit of a pickle. If you are buying search merely for impressions, your click through rate will probably be low and your quality score will be negatively affected. It becomes imperative to write compelling copy, bid on relevant terms and bring users to a relevant landing page; all of which result in a higher click through rate and potentially less impressions.
So far I have demonstrated how Google is making us better marketers by:
- Forcing us to be more strategic
- We can no longer rely on scale economics alone to get the message across to a large number of people
- Ensuring we write more effective copy
- Witty taglines don’t always cut it on Google
- Making us be relevant to consumers
- Need I say more?
Google Is Also Forcing All Of Us To Create Media
Pretend for a moment you are a toothbrush manufacturer. You may say to yourself, “I am not a media producer, and why should I be?” Sure, as a toothbrush manufacturer you have created witty commercials, but you paid your fancy Madison Avenue ad agency millions of dollars to do so, and you cannot afford to do it often.
In the slides below you can see how Oral B decided to fulfill the need for content and it seems to be beneficial. Not only is Oral B able to provide more than one reason to go to their site, their content helps to gain visibility on search engines.
Branded content is all the rage these days, but Google and other engines are forcing brands to create both text based and multimedia content if they want to be discovered, and as a result, marketers are adding more value to their consumers than ever before.
