Google Woos Local Advertisers
Google Inc., which helped popularize the idea of automated ad sales on the Web, has been quietly turning to an old-fashioned tool—phone calls—to compete in the hot market for local business advertising. — The Internet-search giant this year …
Context & Ripple Effects
Google's push into local advertising has been building for years: it first tested local ads on Maps back in January 2006, rolled out a simplified ad unit aimed at local businesses in October 2009, and introduced click-to-call billing inside mobile ads at the start of 2010. Each step made buying easier for a small merchant, yet all of it stayed self-service.
What changed this week is the channel, not the product: as the Journal reports, Google's sales team is picking up the phone to pitch local businesses directly — an admission that the automated ad machine it pioneered does not, on its own, win over merchants who have never bought search advertising.
First-order effects
- Small and mid-sized local businesses now get human hand-holding into Google's ad products rather than having to navigate self-service tools alone, lowering the barrier that kept many of them off the platform.
- Google's sales organization expands beyond its traditional large-advertiser accounts, committing phone-sales headcount to accounts whose budgets are far smaller than those reps historically chased.
Second-order effects
- Rivals and intermediaries who sell local advertising through phone salesforces — yellow-pages-style publishers and local ad resellers — now compete directly against the search leader on their home turf of personal outreach.
- Agencies and resellers that earn margins managing local advertisers' search campaigns risk being bypassed if Google builds the relationship itself.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the winning local ad model is a hybrid: fully automated auction machinery underneath, with human sellers layered on top to recruit the long tail of Main Street advertisers that pure self-service never reached.
- That structure pushes the local ad market toward consolidation around platforms wealthy enough to fund both software and a national salesforce, squeezing smaller local media sellers whose only asset was the relationship.
The trend: Web advertising platforms built on automated self-service are re-adopting old-fashioned human sales calls to capture local business budgets they could not reach through software alone.