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May 9, 2008

Google's Mayer Talks Image Ads in Search

On Bloomberg Radio this week, Google Search exec Marissa Mayer was asked how Google justifies blowing off the $200 million per year the company claims it could make from text ads on its image search results. Her response, "Ads should match the results." She said if Google were to run ads in Image Search, they would likely be image ads. She also said attention would be paid to the relevance, user experience, and types of interaction with image search.

Based on those remarks, Bloomberg posted a follow-up story, "Google May Run Display Advertisements With Image-Search Results," that makes such advertising appear imminent. Then came the blogged headlines: "Google Will Put Display Ads Into Image Searches on Tom's Guide and the speculative "Will Image Ads Bring Google More Money?. Are these publications, and plenty others, jumping to conclusions? Yes.

Listen to the radio interview (I recommend using Explorer, it crashes Firefox) for yourself. Mayer is answering questions rather than offering information about upcoming advertising products.

That said, selling ads on image search results pages would contribute significant revenues to Google. There's interest from advertisers, too. "For advertisers to have a very visual product… could certainly be a great opportunity," said Kevin Lange, director of operations at SMG Search, a division of Starcom MediaVest.

The caveat for image search versus text search: "What is the mindset that goes to image search and searches for 'car,' as opposed to Google.com and searches for 'car.'"

Lange also said Image search is a relatively small user base. ComScore data reports 707 million searches in image search, compared to 8.3 billion searches on all Google sites combined in March. Google received 149.6 billion unique searchers in March, and Google Image Search received 43.7 million uniques.

Posted by Enid Burns at 4:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

AdMission Sells Some Assets to Cobalt

Post written by Fred Aun.

AdMission, a developer of dynamic display ads for small and local advertisers, has sold "certain assets" to The Cobalt Group. The companies did not confirm a report that the assets in question are its Spotlight Ads division, and would only say the deal was needed to keep up with the times.

"Online advertising is an extremely exciting and rapidly evolving market and display advertising is the fastest growing segment of the category," said a statement posted to AdMission's site. "AdMission has pioneered the concept of highly effective dynamic ad formats that will shape the industry in the years to come. To fully achieve the potential of the AdMission ad platform we believe it needs to be part of a larger entity with considerable sales and marketing resources behind it."

The company re-assured its customers it will continue working with and supporting them. In fact, it said they can look forward to "a major enhancement release" of the platform in this quarter.

Cobalt provides digital marketing services to more than 10,000 companies in North America including a big chunk of the automotive industry.

"Support for the AdMission platform, partners and customer base will be retained in San Ramon, CA as a division of Cobalt," noted AdMission, adding that most of its current customer support, development, IT and integration staffers "are remaining on the team."

Posted by Zachary Rodgers at 3:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

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