The death march for traditional advertising cut a surprising path through the offices of the Boy Scouts of America.
It was December 24 in Palo Alto, California, and Google’s chief financial officer—a Canadian transplant named Patrick Pichette—was driving around his new hometown looking for a Christmas tree. Unsure where to even start his search, he picked up his smartphone and spoke the words: “Christmas tree, Palo Alto.” Using algorithmic wizardry developed by engineers just down the road at Google’s Mountain View campus, the phone parsed his words, converting them to a search request. Almost instantly, the phone returned a result based on Pichette’s location: The Boy Scouts, whose Palo Alto office was just minutes away, was selling Christmas trees; the phone even provided driving directions.
“Eighty bucks later, there you go,” Pichette says, in the manner of a child wowed by a brand new toy. “Imagine the hours I would have spent driving around looking for a tree.”
Pichette likes telling this anecdote because it suggests just how disruptive Google’s technology can be for advertisers. Rather than blanketing an area with billboards or buying time on local radio stations, the Boy Scouts could rely on Google’s search results to place its listing squarely in front of a very motivated group of buyers. The Scouts were lucky: Their tree lot came up as the top result. But even if it hadn’t, the troop could have simply paid for a sponsored link to be delivered to anyone searching for a Christmas tree in the vicinity. Moreover, Google would then be able to collect meticulous data about anyone who clicked on the link, where they were when they encountered it, and what keywords or images caught their attention. The whole process is ruthlessly analytical, and promises to eliminate much of the guesswork that usually pervades other advertising channels.
Advertising is one of the few industries where it’s virtually impossible to know if money spent is money well-spent. Is a Super Bowl commercial really worth $3 million? Is Tiffany & Co. a more alluring brand if its ad appears in The New York Times instead of USA Today? And what makes a good ad, anyway? These and other questions have plagued marketers for decades as they seek to refine the murky art of persuasion. Now, platoons of Google engineers are threatening to make such questions irrelevant by reframing the entire scenario: Let the consumers tell advertisers what they want.
But how, exactly, do you find out what the consumer wants? Why, you ask them. In a way, this is the task that Google was born to do. Every time a user sends a search request through one of the company’s servers, they are not only telling Google what they want, but where, when and how they’re looking for it. The company tracks and catalogues every aspect of the user’s request, which adds up to a lot of information. Every three days or so, Google processes as much as 70 petabytes* of data—more than the entire written works of human history. For advertisers, the key to knowing whether an ad will be successful or not is buried in that data. This digital treasure trove may soon render many traditional methods of measurement—from focus groups to Nielsen ratings—hopelessly obsolete.
The single best thing you get from the Web is the ability to be proven wrong fast — Avinash Kaushik, Google's self-described "analytics evangelist"
