Google Betting Big On Mobile Ads

The NY Times offers an interesting article this morning, profiling Google’s efforts around mobile AdSense and display advertising on smartphones. It’s equally a profile of some of the people who work on the teams behind those efforts. The article is as much about process and Google’s culture as it is about mobile advertising:

On Tuesday, Aug. 11, which was supposed to be two weeks before the ads’ introduction, she and a group of marketers, engineers and sales people, most of them in Mountain View, Calif., were reviewing their progress in a Web conference.

Paul Feng, group product manager for mobile ads, asked Ms. VanDyke to update the group. She was using a type of coding that instructed the Web page to pull a piece of content from another source, in this case Google’s ad server. But she had never done this type of programming before, and was having trouble getting the ad to align properly. “Did that make sense?” she asked.

It seemed to. The other employees jumped in, arguing over whether this should be positioned as a new product feature or a new product, and asking for data for advertisers.

Google’s efforts on the mobile front are almost too numerous to mention (certainly in this post). According to Nielsen data Google also operates one of the top mobile ad networks (already).

Update: Google launches new AdSense units for high-end mobile phones (iPhone et al.). Here’s more explanation from the AdSense blog and the Google blog.