E-Media Tidbits

Google's slogan may be "Don't be evil," but that doesn't mean that the world's largest search engine isn't aiming for world domination.

In a downloadable presentation by Jonathan Rosenberg (senior vice president of product management), on Google's investor relations site, published in March, slide 38 ("A fresh approach to offline ads") clearly shows what looks like a print magazine. The words "Ads by Google" appearing above advertisements on magazine pages.

I've been trying to understand how they would do this, because how do you translate a pay-per-click model to a print product that is not interactive? This is a one big fat guess -- but perhaps Google will ensure unique URL identifiers in the form of a number, cellphone number or maybe an SMS on each print ad it places. Every time the unique URL is accessed by virtue of the fact that a reader wants to find out more about the product in the ad, the publisher is paid and the advertiser pays, much like online. The booking and reporting system will most likely be driven by Google's excellent online, do-it-yourself, reporting and booking tools.

For a long time now traditional advertising has escaped the same kind of scrutiny that online advertising has been subjected to by virtue of the fact that the internet is highly measurable. Google may now be bringing stronger measurability to the print world.

Of course, I may be completely wrong.