After it built the engine that – a decade later, still – is the crux of internet search, Google differentiated from other such start-ups by continuing along its trajectory of success.
In 2004, Google made its initial public offering, a successful effort that netted nearly $3 billion. In the effort to build a thriving business model, Google capitalized on the search function with the most successful advertising efforts in AdWords and AdSense, the two products that produce most of Google’s revenue. Just this week, Google finalized a deal to acquire DoubleClick. Still today, in a seemingly constant effort to monitor the best non-Google platforms out there and acquire, as evidenced by the DoubleClick purchase, Google continues to grow and improve. This notion is also encompassed in the company’s core principles that encourage employees to spend a portion of their work day on private projects they believe in.
Interfacing with DoubleClick will allow Google to drill down even further in the next phase of advertising and marketing. In today’s widely cast media landscape, where “media snackers” graze on blogs and search results and news sites and other content that meets their specific interests, advertising needs to be less accidental and more intent based and heavily targeted. As media expands, consumers will hone the media they ingest with greater care, and advertising needs to do the same to reach people.
Google, as well as other companies like Overture, began to explore such targeted marketing several years ago, and,while Overture was purchases by Yahoo, Google turned AdWords and AdSense into the core of its business model. As promised by Eric Schmidt on the Google blog, the new acquisition will allow Google to “complement search and content-based advertising with display advertising capabilities, … dramatically improv[ing] the effectiveness, measurability and performance of digital media for publishers, advertisers and agencies.”
But targeted advertising brings with it major concerns about privacy and storage of personal data acquired through Google products. In The Search, Battelle predicts advertising’s future where television and internet usage interface to provide consumers with pointedly targeted marketing. Essentially, TV preferences and search history will be tracked and compared, he predicts, to create a demographic picture of a consumer. That picture would be used to select ads and offers to present to the consumer.
This data mining has already begin, Battelle says:
The Web companies are, in effect, taking the trail of crumbs people leave behind as they move around the Internet, and then analyzing them to anticipate people’s next steps. So anybody who searches for information on such disparate topics as iron supplements, airlines, hotels and soft drinks may see ads for those products and services later on.
Why hasn’t what could easily be perceived as an affront to privacy sparked an uprising among the millions of consumers whose information is being logged, counted, and analyzed? We guard our social security numbers with care, shred extraneous credit-card offers that show up in the mailbox, and pay $1.71 a month to keep phone numbers out of the Yellow Pages. But Google is reading our g-chats (as Battelle wrote in The Search and I experienced with chana masala), logging our search topics, and promoting ads that match up with that information.
Search offers knowledge, and Google offers the best search and platforms out there. We’re willing to trade off a little privacy for all the information Google gives us, putting the answer to any question at the tips of our typing fingers.
As the internet’s power evolves, and companies succeed in developing successful, targeted advertising, we will certainly see our privacy infringed upon to a greater degree. The question is, where will this information-dependent society draw the line?
