Don't be evil unless it is for greater good

Let me ask you a trivia question. Name the company that recently changed its motto from "Don't be evil" to "Don't be evil unless it is for greater good" ?

Don't know the answer - let me help you with another hint. This company holds the largest market share in the online advertising. How about taking a guess now ?

You guessed it right - Google. As if their overwhelming stake in the interactive marketing was not big enough, they recently decided that they are going to enter print marketing as well. Infact, as the rumors have it, they have already started a pilot run of print advertising and will soon start becoming very aggressive about it.

When I heard this news, my first reaction was "Are these guys out of their minds ?". I mean, its good that these guys are leaders in online advertising, but that is because they provide some value to advertisement by targeting it to the right context. What value could they possibly provide in print advertising where the market is already saturated with killer whales ? If there is no additional value out there, is it just a ploy to diversify into a media company and hatch your eggs the way others do ? Nah, I don't believe google would do something that simple.

So I rattled my brains and tried to tune in to the frequency at which the google management was thinking and immediately one part of the puzzle was crystal clear. In order to gain market share at a rate that would be acceptable to google ( which apparently is much higher than what lesser mortals dream of ), they would have to come up with something unique, something differentiated, something that would provide more value to either the publisher or the advertiser.

Analyzing it from the perspective of the value to the publisher, all a publisher cares about is selling off their advertising space as quickly as possible at an acceptable price point. But that happens today as well - where could google possibly innovate ? For starters, google could use its leadership position in online advertising and become one stop shop to get a publisher access to thousands of advertisers. Alternatively, google could buy advertising space in bulk from the publisher and auction it to the advertisers in a manner similar to what it does with online advertising today. To take it a step further, google could purchase a centerfold from the publisher and offer to deliver pre-printed advertisements on the centerfolds that the publisher would simply append to their magazines - that would dramatically reduce the hassle of the publisher and would increase the power of google's offering considerably.

From the perspective of the advertiser, google could do a lot more. For starters, it could offer the advertiser an integrated ad campaign that would offer the convenience of both online and offline advertising in a single package. To top it up, google could offer to target a specific subset of audience based upon the product being advertised. For example, an advertiser for a makeup kit may want to target girls between 18 - 24. Google would tell them that in addition to their expertise in locating this target set online, they also have tie-ups with the right set of publishers to improve the impact of their print campaign. To make things better, based upon the track record of online advertisements, google could also make recommendations to the advertisers on the audience they should be targeting. For example, google could analyze the online advertising data and recommend to our advertiser in the previous example that he should be targeting girls between 18 - 24. Normally, companies spend a lot of money with consultants just running tests to identify their target set, and if google could provide them this information, they would have tremendous cost savings.

Hmm, now things are looking bright, but wait, there is more to come. To give its offering a final killer blow, google might want to make its offering unbelievably easy for small advertisers to use. Afterall, it is the volumes of the advertisements online that makes google the king - why shouldn't it do the same thing with print media. We already talked about the centerfold idea, so lets build upon it. Lets assume that it costs $200,000 ( i'm just making up the numbers here ) to buy a centerfold ( 4 full pages of ads ) on some publisher that circulates 500,000 copies monthly. Lets also assume that a meaningful ad would be at least a quarter the size of a page. This means that the lowest amount anyone could spend advertising on this magazine is $12,500. Whew, that is a lot of money - what if there are lots of small advertisers that have a monthly budget of say $2000 ? Google could come up with an offering for these guys and say "We charge 2.5 cents for a quarter page ad per person. How about paying for 80,000 impressions ?" They would then mix and match their orders with the space available in their centerfolds and deliver the printed centerfolds to the publishers. That makes the world fairer - everyone gets a chance to reach a subset of the audience, if not all of them. Wait a minute - publishers have personal information of the subscribers. Why not use that information for better targeting of the ads in the centerfolds. For example, if you sign up for 80,000 impressions of a shaving kit ad your money would not be wasted by sending these centerfolds to blondes.

Thats a lot of stuff to do and I bet I haven't even explored the tip of the iceberg. People say google is evil, I believe it is as exciting as the early days of wall street. Its a fair game for everyone and there is a lot of money to be made. Someday, you might find google claiming "We will show targeted advertisements in your dreams and make them clickable".