Google Doesn’t Get It — Pull is not Push

The announcement that Google is getting out of the radio business is no surprise.  Not because they could not measure performance of the audio ad business, which of course is not resolvable to a formula that smart engineers can go off an code.

Rather, they confuse their success in a pull business with businesses that are push driven. The differences are huge and need to be understood — otherwise its a square peg trying to insert itself into a round hole.

Pull vs Push

Google ad words is a pull business. Users are searching for something. They are motivated to find it. And when they do they are very likely to act on it. Hence, they have seen huge success because those ads are ads that the user is specifcally interested.

Contrast those ads to social media ads which are doing very poorly across the board. Why? Users are not looking for what the ads on social networking sites deliver. Without that intention, users will treat ads with hostility.

Entertainment vs information

Radio ads are push ads. You are trying to insert a concept into a users mind when they really don’t want the interruption. That is why radio and tv ads have to be entertaining. You need to arrest the users attention to listen or watch the ad.

Google adwords are really informational. There is no sex appeal to these ads. Just words in a very constrained space. Information is key in adwords. Get your point across fast and get a motivated searcher/buyer to click on your ad.

Directly trackable vs indirectly measurable

There is an obvious reason why TV and Radio ads are really not measurable. Advertisers are interrupting the user experience to insert a message. They cannot afford to be even more obnoxious and insist that they push a button, type in a code, call a number, etc. Its enough to get the user to actually listen and retain the messaging of the ad.

Adwords is entirely trackable because the CT is precisely what the user is wanting to do — Google is doing the user a service instead of interrupting a user experience. It makes a huge difference when the advertising is inherently part of the experience instead of a distraction from it.

Until Google realizes these basic truths, they will continue to stumble in trying to treat all of advertising as pull when much of the ad business is push.

I am willing to bet that Gmail ads suffer the same bad performance rates as social media ads. Who wants to be advertised to when you are doing something else entirely. I doubt Google will ever break Gmail ads out for that very reason — they are terrible performing.

So on top of the very difficult business of trying to track the performance of an audio ad — (btw. what were they thinking in the magazine space that users would type in a URL off of a magazine page to indicate performance. The only thing that proves is what a stupid idea that was.) — they have the impossible task of motivating folks to listen to an ad that is driven by an algorithm instead of human reason.

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