Businessweek reports that the first wave of Google Print advertisers were disappointed -- 9 to 1. Only one of ten advertisers saw returns sufficient to justify their investment. Businessweek was quick to declare the death of this program.
I'd like to consider a few points not mentioned in their article (nor in any other coverage I've seen of the matter):
- How many traditional advertisers can track activity back to a single print ad well enough to justify it on its face? Probably not many. Any single ad is just a blip in an ocean of marketing activity surrounding a brand or product. If (as it appears was the case in this survey) direct marketers are trying to gauge the performance of their print ads with the same level of detail that they judge their Adwords campaigns, of course they were disappointed. What metric were advertisers using to measure conversions from their print ads?
Consider a kid who read the ad and thought, "That's just the thing for me!" What could that kid then do, that would alert the advertiser to the fact that it was that magazine ad that brought them to the site to buy? Tracking URLs get stripped. People use Google to find URLs even if they have the whole thing there in front of them. The kid could have even come through an Adword ad to get to the site, if the advertiser was bidding #1 on his own brand name or whatever the kid happened to type.
- The companies participating in this trial probably had no experience in print advertising. Copywriters trained to compose 30-character lines of text to fit in an Adwords slot would have a hard time competing with the Madison Avenue folks also advertising in the magazine. People reading a magazine are in an entirely different mindset than those using Google to search for products. How many of the first wave of advertisers considered the implications and produced creatives as well-tuned for this target market as they are for their online market? (Do any of them remember how successful their first online campaigns were?)
- Google needs to recognize it is 'leveraging' a different strength here. The Adwords program provides two benefits -- one is the contextual targeting model, which ads in magazines will largely lack. The other, however, is the low-friction marketplace for advertising. As a middleman, Google can provide a much less painful way for advertisers to deal with publishers. If they focus on that, this program will succeed.
The concerns of advertising tainting editorial content are mitigated by Google Print. The constant negotiating and mind-games are removed.
As a vehicle to allow tiny companies to advertise in the great publications of the world, this initiative is probably doomed. But as a step forward in the development of the advertiser/publisher relationship, this is fantastic.