When Google owns 40% of the online Advertisement you must wonder what they do right.. Right? 
Well, Google made Contextual Advertisment famous, which quickly proved to be their cash cow since their service is all about information that is closely linked you and me.
But Contextual Advertisement seem to be a mature technology now… Too mature… Some good foundations exist but technical improvements don’t seem to stand out.
One example: I use Gmail and by doing so I accept that they will collect annonymous data from all my emails and therefore understand my needs, subjects of interest,etc… They will then target me with ads troughout the Google Ad Network based on those “insights”.
I have been experiencing some cases which I believe Google can improve a lot. For instance, I keep receiving ads about MBA’s but I already took one MBA and don’t intend to take another one any time soon!
It would be more contextualized if they were giving me ads where they could convert into an concrete action from my side. That would mean that they would have to know that I already finished the MBA, not still considering it. Which poses an issue. To do that Google would have dig a bit more into their data (ie, my emails). Maybe that could be done in a simpler form by analysing specific verbs that could be closely associated with the MBA and trough it infer that I already concluded it because those verbs were used in the past tense. For instance “I + finished +MBA” works: I did a quick search in my old emails and found lots of those in emails related to job applications for instance.
Now, I know this is “Easier said than Done”. I know that Google has lot of smart people working on it every single day (and night apparently ). I even know that this is a specific case, creating algorithms that can work for most of keywords is not easy task (I do believe there may be some reverse-engineering kindo-of-thinking that could introduce some lights but that would be a looong story…).
But my main points are two:
Ad networks
There might be different ways of exploring contextuality which may make more sense. As Ad Networks mature Incremental Innovation will introduce new forms of achieving it, but i believe the wave of Contextalized Advertisement may soon be replaced by a new wave. I’ve been thinking for a while about a different Ad Network model that makes more sense under some more niche contexts, IMHO , without the need for the technological complexity of existing networks.
Advertisement campaigns
Once in a while in ADtomic Communications I have the the pleasure to work with cases where the normal keyword logic associated to Google Adwords can easily broken. We’ve been mingling with some cases where the whole model can be turned up-side-down generating some interesting insights.
I believe that, due to the fact that we work so focused on Communication, Selling proposition, Customer Insights and other subjects which are not strictly technology our perspective ends up introducign some interesting (and unexpected) surprises.
If you have are planning some Online Advertisement, why dont you let me know? I would love to know about your project and discuss some details with you… no strings attached… Maybe we get lucky enough to work with you time soon.
