Google Uses Outdoor Billboards To Promote Goog411
Photo by Mike Blumenthal. Used with permission. — Mike Blumenthal took a picture of a billboard ad in upstate New York for Google's free directory assistance alternative, Goog411. This is interesting and amusing for a number of reasons.
Context & Ripple Effects
Google has been quietly seeding Goog-411 billboards outside major metros, and Mike Blumenthal's snapshot from upstate New York makes the tactic visible: outdoor ads pushing a free, phone-based directory assistance line. The irony analysts flagged is that Google, the archetypal online advertiser, is buying the oldest offline medium — but the target makes sense, since Goog-411 works from any telephone and reaches people who never touch a search box.
The placement matters because directory assistance was, until this service appeared, a paid product owned by the carriers. A billboard recruiting callers away from it puts Google's brand in front of exactly the rural and non-broadband users its web properties miss.
First-order effects
- Upstate New York callers gain a no-cost substitute for carrier-run 411, putting direct price pressure on the paid directory-assistance revenue lines of the incumbent telephone companies.
Second-order effects
- Each free call builds Google's corpus of spoken business-name queries against a local-business index, giving it a dataset on offline demand that pure-web competitors cannot replicate.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Google's free consumer utilities double as data-collection front ends — voice queries here prefigure a local-search and advertising business aimed at callers, not browsers.
The trend: Consumer web companies are buying traditional offline media to recruit users into free services whose durable value is the behavioral and business data they accumulate.