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Sep. 19, 2007 at 10:22am Eastern by Greg Sterling
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.
The company, which has historically not marketed its products (although that is changing), is using a very traditional ad medium to promote its non-traditional local voice search offering. However, people will see this when they're driving in their cars, which is one of the expected use cases. Another interesting thing is the location, a relatively obscure rural area:
Photo by Mike Blumenthal.
Used with permission.
But perhaps that's also quite intentional, to test a campaign and see if it drives traffic, so to speak.
Postscript: Valleywag picked this up and thinks it's not a test of the efficacy of traditional media to build an audience for Goog411. Rather they think:Google is interested in expanding into all forms of advertising, including the $7 billion outdoor market -- billboards, that is. Perhaps it's purchased some billboard space, in the hopes of using its dynamic, auction-based ad-selling system to resell it at a profit. Until it finds buyers, it may be using the billboards to promote its own services.
Clearly Google has an out-of-home strategy (some discussion here), but I'm not sure this is its introduction.
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By Greg Sterling
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Reader Comments
They have one on 101 in downtown SF. I don't think they are trying to hide it.
Greg, that's so funny that you'd post this today -- I saw a billboard on my way to Metropolitan Golf Links in Oakland this afternoon & suspected the same thing -- Google is buying the space on the billboards & planning to re-sell it via an auction system at a later date...
There's a billboard at Polk & Sacramento in San Francisco. They're not trying to hide or test anything.
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September 19, 2007 9:35 PMHi Greg,
Interesting article.
Frank Fuchs and I exchanged a few comments about Google experimenting with offline advertising for Google Maps in London, in the beginning of 2007. Seems like they have moved on a bit from window stickers ;)
http://www.locallytype.com/2007/01/29/were-famous-find-us-on-google-offline-advertising/
Cheers,
Mark
They have one on 101 in downtown SF. I don't think they are trying to hide it.