Likeable Content Daily

Today’s post is written by guest blogger and friend of theKbuzz, Ben Hovaness. We loved his take on Google Buzz’s advertising potential and so asked him to share with our readers. Let us know what you think in the comments!

Google’s launch of Buzz, a social networking service integrated into Gmail, prompted a firestorm of criticism. Some observers focused on Buzz’s insufficient privacy measures; primarily the fact that Google originally established Buzz relationships automatically, based on your e-mail history.  Others, including theKbuzz’s own Dave Kerpen, suggested that Google was late to the party, and that Facebook was going to eat its lunch via a full webmail client.

The story lost amidst these near-term positioning narratives is how Buzz is poised to change the nature of online advertising.  Let’s start by looking at Google’s revenue model.  As a Mashable post succinctly put it last year: for Google, Revenue=Amount of Time on the Web.  That describes the volume portion of Google’s ad business; maximizing the number of ads that are fed to you by hosting a variety of extremely useful web apps like Google Docs, Google Finance, and Gmail.  But ads are useless if they don’t ultimately connect buyers and sellers.

This is where quality comes in.  Google is obsessed with ad quality.  It holds AdWords optimization seminars all over the world dozens of times per month to ensure that the quality of AdWords campaigns is high.  Until now, however, there have been hard limits on the level of ad quality – that is, Google’s ability to match you with an advertiser selling something you want. In fact, up until recently, Gmail ads were informed by nothing more than the contents of the message you were currently viewing!  Ergo, the ads you see in your Gmail inbox are not informed by your past purchase history, where you like to eat, what’s on your mind, or what your friends are interested in.  These holes in Google’s knowledge make ads annoying.

Buzz is intended to plug these holes.  With its location-based features, which tie Buzz updates to a physical location, Google knows where you like to spend your time and money in the real world.  Through your stream of Buzz updates, Google knows what’s on your mind.  And the social map you’ve constructed on Buzz allows Google to see what your friends are interested in.  By providing all this data, you’re helping Google sell you ads.  But not just any ads.

At a certain point, ads stop being ads as we currently conceive of them. Imagine getting an ad that said “It’s dinner time. There’s great, cheap sushi just a few blocks away. Tomoe Sushi has 4 stars on Yelp, and Ben went there a year ago and loved it.” At something like that level of precision targeting and personalization (and it’s a fuzzy threshold, granted) ads stop being obnoxious and start being truly helpful. It’s sort of an advertising nirvana.

That is what Buzz means.  It’s not just another vector for ad revenue, or another also-ran social network. It has the potential to make a qualitative change in what online advertising is, transforming it from a spottily-informed pusher into a trusted advisor.

Ben Hovaness works for Pica9, a group of brand logistics experts specializing in marketing automation. His opinions and good looks are his own.