Photo by Mike Blumenthal. Used with permission.

People tend to squeal with delight or its opposite when they see advertising in the wild for Google the company. It has happened precious few times: for Google Checkout, Goog-411, and most recently Google Transit, among a couple of other isolated cases. AdAdge covers Google advertising for Transit and on its own behalf more generally.

Because Google developed one of the world’s top brands without almost any consumer marketing, any such advertising seems somewhat strange and anomalous. By contrast, Google’s top competitors spend millions in online and traditional marketing every year. So does Apple, Google’s chief rival for the top global brand spot. Therefore, it should come as no surprise to people that the company is gradually introducing more advertising for its products. Indeed, there are numerous “products” at Google that mainstream consumers know very little about. Google Health is one that could directly benefit from an ad or PR campaign.

Google does have a “built in” advantage in that it can leverage its enormous consumer traffic to expose millions of daily users (and advertisers) to new services at will. But as Google matures, it will need to do more marketing of itself as a company — although that may take less conventional forms.

Related Topics: Google: Maps & Local | Google: Marketing

About The Author: Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land. He writes a personal blog Screenwerk, about SoLoMo issues and connecting the dots between online and offline. He also posts at Internet2Go, which is focused on the mobile Internet. Follow him @gsterling. See more articles by Greg Sterling