MEDIA AND MARKETING:Why is Google bothering with print media ads, a format critics say it is helping to destroy, asks SIOBHÁN O'CONNELL.
FOR THE first time in Ireland, Google is using advertising in print media to target the business community. Using inserts to promote Google AdWords, the pitch is that advertising online with Google can help businesses garner sales, with the carrot of €50 in free advertising.
What’s interesting about the ad campaign is that Google’s success is predicated on the fact that traditional forms of advertising are less effective than paid search and other types of online ads. So why bother with the media format that critics say Google is responsible for destroying?
Over to Lorraine Twohill (38), the Carlow woman who this week moved to California to take up her new job as Google’s vice-president of global marketing.
She rejects any suggestion the slowing economy is having an impact on Google or that the company now has to advertise more. “We are seeing very healthy growth especially among small businesses,” she said. “We absolutely don’t have to advertise, but we are trying to reach out more to small business people by targeting the publications they read.”
Google’s sales and marketing budget for the first half of 2009 topped $900 million (€640 million), although offline ad spending is estimated at just $20 million annually.
“Google doesn’t do a huge amount of traditional marketing,” says Twohill. “We like to walk the walk and tend to rely heavily on viral marketing and PR. Within the consumer market, our target demographic is the internet user.
“On the business side, we have three groups that we invest a lot of marketing time with. One is ad agencies, the other is large corporate advertisers and the third is small businesses.”
Twohill adds: “We have to keep our pulse on what people do and what their media consumption is . . . Our culture is about working at a fast pace in small scrappy teams: get out to market, try, learn, test and grow.”
Google’s bread-and-butter business is still displaying text ads alongside search results, but the company also now sells display ads and has high hopes for that space. It’s a development that is causing sleepless nights in ad agencies.
WPP boss Martin Sorrell has described Google as a “frenemy”, given his ambivalent attitude towards the company. Sorrell says WPP spends about $900 million with Google buying search terms, yet at the same time Google allows advertisers to bypass ad agencies and place ads directly.
Twohill downplays Sorrell’s concerns: “Given that we have a very large advertiser base, we can match our advertiser base and contextually targeted ads to great content websites and everybody wins.”
For many small businesses, Google’s AdWords is now where most of their marketing budget is spent. With AdWords, companies pay a fluctuating rate for popular search terms such as “Dublin Hotel”. The more a company pays, the higher up in the results list they’ll be when the Google user searches for those key words.
The other way for companies to improve their rankings in Google search results is to optimise their websites with technical tricks that impress Google and other search engines.
Dublin-based training company Professional Development on occasion has spent up to €40,000 a month on Google AdWords, according to sales director Dave Finnegan. Now though the company has slashed its outlay on AdWords to between €5,000 and €8,000 a month, yet has increased the number and value of transactions generated.
Finnegan says: “We hired a full- time person to optimise our search positioning to make sure we are in the top three listings when people search in our category. With AdWords, you agree to pay a fixed price to Google every time someone clicks on your ad. We were getting hundreds of clicks to a particular page and no transaction resulted.
“There will always be companies who . . . just bid blindly for Google AdWords . . . That’s the very last thing people should do and more and more companies are realising this.”
A recent piece for this column, written by Kevin Dawson of RTÉ, raised a number of points about TV3's finances. The article contained a number of inaccuracies, including overstating TV3's bank debt and alleging a relationship with a financial institution with which it has no involvement, which RTÉ acknowledges is inaccurate. The Irish Timesis happy to clarify these points.
