Google’s vision for the future of advertising in 2015

29 Sep 2010

Video will dominate the future of advertising, with 50pc of online ads featuring video by 2015, Google has revealed. By 2015, the smartphone will be the No 1 screen through which users will engage with advertisers’ digital brands.

With 99pc of its top clients now running campaigns on its Display Network and Android hurtling towards No 1 smartphone operating system in the world, Google seems to have many reasons for smiling. It’s no wonder that Google CEO Eric Schmidt is keeping his eye in the rear-view mirror on Microsoft with Bing and its Windows Phone 7, not Facebook.

According to Google, 50pc of ad campaigns will include video ads bought on a cost-per-view basis, which means that the user will choose whether to watch the ad or not, and the advertiser will only pay if the user watches. That’s up from very little today.

It said that today, advertisers are starting to deliver ads that are tailored to particular audiences. Many are using real-time bidding technology, so that they can bid on the ad space that they think is most valuable. In 2015, 50pc of these ads will be bought using this real-time technology.

Smart and sexy

Google presented its vision for advertising at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s MIXX Conference in New York, entitled “Display 2015: Smart and Sexy.”

The internet giant said that with smartphone growth skyrocketing, mobile is going be the No 1 screen through which users engage with advertisers’ digital brands.

“Today, the ‘click’ is the most important way that advertisers measure their display ad campaigns, but it’s not always the best measure — especially if an ad campaign is designed to boost things like brand awareness or recall,” said Neal Mohan, vice-president of product management at Google.

“With new measurement technologies emerging, in five years, there will be five metrics that advertisers commonly regard as more important than the click.

“Just like most news articles on the web today can be commented on, shared, discussed, subscribed to and recommended, in 2015, 75pc of ads on the web will be ‘social’ in nature — across dozens of formats, sites and social communities.

“Rich media formats work. They enable great creativity and interaction between users and advertisers, but today they only represent about 6pc of total display ad impressions. That will increase to 50pc, for brand-building ad campaigns.

“All the investments that are making display advertising smarter and sexier will help publishers increase their revenues. Display advertising is going to grow to a $50bn industry in five years.”

TrueView and Teracent

Mohan said that 99pc of Google’s top 1,000 clients are now running campaigns on the Google Display Network and last year they increased their spending on display advertising by more than 75pc.

Google has demoed some new video ad formats on YouTube called “TrueView”, which will give people the option to skip an ad if they don’t want to watch, or to choose from multiple ads the one they want to watch. Advertisers only pay if the user chooses to watch their ad.

As well as this, Google’s new Teracent technology Mohan said it can dynamically alter the creative elements of an ad in real-time to make it more relevant and effective, depending on factors like geographic location, language, the content of the website and the time of day.

Mohan said that Google Goggles, a way to search the web on mobile devices just by taking a picture, could one day enable advertisers to deliver great display ads to users. “Imagine pointing your phone’s camera at an ad for a car in a magazine, and having the car appear in 3D in your mobile device. Or pointing at a movie poster and having the movie trailer play in the device, right in your hand. No QR codes, no downloads!”

Proving what rich media can do, Mohan and Barry Salzman, managing director of Media & Platforms for the Americas’ speech was broadcast live in a number of expandable ad units across the web, and was updated with tweets in real time.

John Kennedy is a journalist who served as editor of Silicon Republic for 17 years

editorial@siliconrepublic.com