Radio Tunes Out Google in Rare Miss for Web Titan from the Wall Street Journal has some excellent history on why Google Radio ultimately failed earlier this year.

I’ll quote the story early on, but the Wall Street Journal piece is excellent, on its own.

A look at what went wrong shows that Google misjudged the capacity of its technology to work beyond the Web, and underestimated the human side of the business. Radio stations refused to turn over airtime to a computer algorithm that set prices far lower than their own rates. Big advertisers steered clear.

The key issues outlined in the article:

• Hard to track radio ads
• Clients were too small
• Publishers were less willing to change
• Stations were “frustrated” with Google’s way

Further coverage on this topic can be found at Techmeme.

Maybe that headline overreaches a little but not entirely. For those that have been wondering whether Google’s GrandCentral acquisition, which the company made in mid 2007 and thereafter seemed to neglect, would suffer the same fate as Dodgeball or Jaiku . . . wonder no more.

Using the GrandCentral infrastructure, and currently only available to existing GrandCentral users, Google is announcing a wide range of new services under the banner of Google Voice. These services include — get ready — “free calling” and “low-priced international calls” among a range of other things.

It would be easy at this point to get very worked up and use adjectives such as “disruptive” or otherwise go into hyperbole mode and talk about all the incumbents these services take aim at. I’ll restrain myself and reserve judgment; voice quality and reliability are potential issues. But Skype and other VoIP providers will sit up and take immediate notice for obvious reasons.

It’s services like Skype and now Google Voice that will keep the mobile operators from offering data-only plans. Skype has faced resistance getting its services onto mobile handsets and now the hairs on the back of AT&T’s neck will be up.

Here are the included features and services of Google Voice. It offers the promise of a single number that rings all phones, but also integrated SMS, free calling, free voicemail, transcription of voicemail and conference calling. Gmail integration is reportedly coming too. The services are also tied into Goog-411. For years companies such as IBM and Microsoft have spoken about “unified communications,” which has been something of an elusive dream.

What we’re seeing here may be the beginning of such services for the masses. When can I get my account?

As an aside — I always object when people raise the almost perfunctory “will there be ads?” issue with new Google services, but I’m going to do it this time — there are some interesting ad opportunities, both for text ads and audio ads (think GMail content scanning). Google just shuttered Radio Ads but pledged to find other distribution mechanisms for audio ads; might this be one?

And then there are the traditional privacy objections, summarized in this quote from the NY Times’ story:

“It raises two distinct problems,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “In the privacy world, it is increased profiling and tracking of users without safeguards. But the other problem is the growing consolidation of Internet-based services around one dominant company.”

There’s more discussion on Techmeme.

Postscript by Barry Schwartz: Google has began mass inviting people to Google Voice on June 25, 2009.

Google continues to pull back the reins on some of its product and service offerings, today announcing that they’re shutting down Google Audio Ads and Google Radio Automation.

In a post on the Google Traditional Media blog, Google’s Susan Wojcicki explains the service wasn’t as successful as they hoped:

In 2006, we launched Google Audio Ads and Google Radio Automation to create a new revenue stream for broadcast radio, produce more relevant advertising for listeners and streamline the buying and selling of radio ads. While we’ve devoted substantial resources to developing these products and learned a lot along the way, we haven’t had the impact we hoped for.

Advertisers can continue using Google Audio Ads until May 31st. The Google Radio Automation software will be sold. Google will instead focus on developing a service that delivers ads for online streaming audio.

Google says this decision could lead to the loss of up to 40 jobs.

It was just a few weeks ago that Google shut down its newspaper advertising program. And shortly before that, Google announced the closure of several other products/services, too.

There’s more discussion on Techmeme.

The Inside AdWords blog announced Clear Channel’s inventory of about 1700 AM and FM stations are now available for purchase at Google Audio Ads. For more about the ads, see our Google Audio Ads archive.

Like many agencies and advertisers, we’ve been dragging our feet before trying Google’s relatively new advertising options. My rationale has been that search (or PPC) advertising is inherently better than the traditional advertising media: print, radio and TV.

PPC advertising has been trouncing traditional media due largely to the fact that efficiency and accountability are “built in.” The auction model (almost) guarantees that ad spending will be no higher than necessary to remain competitive. But it’s the built-in accountability – the ability to monitor and adjust for optimal ROI or ROAS – that makes PPC advertising the ad medium of choice for profit-hungry advertisers.

Recently I took a closer look at Google’s print, radio and TV advertising capabilities – and son of a gun – they’ve got auction and ROI-tracking built in, too! Here’s what I found:

Let’s start with the easiest one: print. Google’s Print Ads system lets you place display ads in thousands of newspapers nationwide. It isn’t, strictly speaking, auction-based. Here’s what Google says:

“Print Ads advertisers extend bids to newspapers, essentially naming a price for the insertions they want. The publisher then has the opportunity to accept or decline that price. Unlike an auction system, a publisher is able to accept multiple bids as desired.”

So while it’s not an auction, advertisers can set a maximum price they’re willing to pay. In the nicely-designed AdWords interface for managing Print campaigns, advertisers see the newspaper’s “listed rate,” and can choose to bid below that rate.

Reporting is primitive, but accountability is as easy as tracking print ad performance has always been: advertisers can include a custom url in each ad, or a custom toll-free number, for example.

Good documentation of the Google Print Ads system is available here.

Let’s move on to a trickier realm: Radio advertising (well-documented here). Google calls this Audio Ads, taking into consideration that ads will eventually be delivered via a variety of channels in addition to Radio – in podcasts, for example.

With Audio Ads, advertisers have the option to either reserve or bid on available radio air time. Bidding is risky, since audio ads will only be run if/when there are available open time slots, but this allows advertisers to buy bargain air time and control their costs.

Here’s where it gets interesting: Accountability is not only built into Audio Ads—it’s even better and more valuable than Google’s search and content advertising.

First, there’s an option for free call tracking. That’s right: the service that others offer at high prices is free and built into Audio Ads. Here’s Google’s description:

“With call reporting, we’ll assign you a tracking phone number and redirect all calls it receives to the phone number of your choosing (we recommend your main business line). Call reporting lets you track the total number, the cities of origin, and the date and time, of calls that are made to your assigned call reporting number.”

Once you’ve set up call reporting in your AdWords account, create an audio ad that references your assigned number. When a user phones the call reporting number mentioned in your audio ad, Google passes the call on to your regular business number and records the basic details of the call. Then, you can sign in to your account to view a full report of all the calls.”

This, my friends, is huge. It lets advertisers assess their ads’ ROI right down to the city, date and time. (Google: will you be offering this to AdWords Search and Content advertisers soon?)

Even better—Google supplies a big set of reports that can be run within the AdWords interface. I won’t get into the details, but you can get a good idea from this screen shot of the report types available under the new Audio Ad Reports tab:

Let’s move on to even more interesting (and potentially more powerful) territory: TV advertising. Google announced their TV ad beta testing in April, and has recently posted details at http://www.google.com/adwords/tvads.

Details are still a bit sketchy, but it’s clear that the TV advertising system will feature an auction format (bidding based on CPM—cost-per-impression), and… wait for it… performance metrics:

“Once your ad has aired, use Google’s reporting metrics to immediately understand the effectiveness of your ads. Google is now plugged into millions of set top boxes and we are measuring second-by-second viewership data across all dayparts. This valuable data will enable you to find out which ads are engaging your viewers.”

Here’s a screen capture from Google’s online demo:

These early forays into traditional advertising media have huge implications:

• Google is determined to shift all advertising to an AdWords system that introduces auction and accountability to an industry that has never known such pinpoint efficiency and accuracy.
• Traditional ad agencies will succeed or fail depending on whether they can intelligently employ these new capabilities—which requires them to understand and embrace auction systems, analytics and accountability.
• “New media” agencies that bill themselves as “Full service” will need to broaden their skill sets to include radio, TV and print—or decide to stick to their search/content niches.

So ad industry brethren: you’ve received your heads-up. Get hip or get left behind.

Google announced they have completed their audio ad test and is now in the process of rolling out audio ads to all US advertisers. In fact, I reported on May 15th, that many advertisers began seeing the audio ads option within their AdWords console.

Today, EBay to Broker Radio Ad Time from the Wall Street Journal reports that eBay is getting into the audio ad (radio ad) auctioning business as well. eBay with Bid4Spots Inc. of Encino, California will begin allowing radio stations to auction off air time within the eBay media marketplace. More than 2,300 radio stations are expected to participate.

Google just announced that Google AdSense for Audio is now supported by radio station automation software from Broadcast Electronics (BE), ENCO Systems and LAN International’s VIERO. The announcement comes alongside the other news of the Google & Clear Channel partnership.

This morning the New York Times is reporting that Google has struck a deal to sell radio air time on Clear Channel’s network. Clear Channel is the US’s largest single owner of radio stations. This had been rumored but the formal announcement (not yet posted) will apparently include “30-second spots on all of Clear Channel’s 675 stations during all programs and all times of the day.” (In other words: not remnant inventory.)

The deal is quite similar it appears to the recent Dish Network deal. I have some additional discussion on my personal blog.

Postscript: . The Google Blog has now posted about the news, and here’s the text of the release that just came out:

Clear Channel Radio and Google Will Jointly Drive Radio Advertiser Expansion

Agreement Makes Guaranteed Inventory Available to Google Advertisers On More Than 675 Clear Channel Radio Stations

SAN ANTONIO AND MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., April 16, 2007 — Clear Channel Radio and Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG), today announced a multi-year agreement that enables Google to sell a guaranteed portion of 30-second advertising inventory available on more than 675 of Clear Channel’s AM/FM stations. Specific financial terms are not being disclosed.

Under the agreement, Google™ Audio Ads advertisers will have national distribution, enabling them to reach specific audiences, at specific times, in targeted geographies. For Clear Channel, this agreement opens up an additional sales channel and provides supplemental revenue by making Clear Channel inventory available to advertisers who previously had not used radio.

“This is a true win-win,” said John Hogan, Chief Executive Officer of Clear Channel Radio. “Clear Channel Radio gets access to an entirely new group of advertisers within a new and complementary sales channel, and Google adds another option for its existing customers. Google has proven its ability to gain premiums for advertising inventory and that fits perfectly into our broader strategy of building value for advertisers while increasing our overall revenue yield. We’re committed to working with the best-in-class and Google has a real economic incentive to produce meaningfully higher CPMs.”

“Clear Channel is the market leader in delivering radio value to consumers and advertisers and has built an innovative platform to manage its on-air ad inventory,” said Eric Schmidt, Chief Executive Officer of Google. “We look forward to working with Clear Channel Radio by providing a unique set of advertisers and a system that will increase the effectiveness and measurability of connecting advertisers with radio listeners.”

Clear Channel Radio’s national and local sales forces will continue to focus on the company’s most lucrative advertiser relationships, and on the many advertisers who seek specialized advertising packages and concepts. Google will focus primarily on advertisers who currently run ads online but do not run ads on radio.

For Clear Channel, the move is part of a larger initiative to differentiate its on-air ad inventory. The company created a number of special positions (such as first-in-pod and islands), new and innovative spot types (adlets and blinks), unparalleled creative resources (the Creative Services Group), and fresh combinations on-/off-air/online packages. These efforts have produced many new advertiser alternatives and steady gains in revenue yield-per-minute. Using its Viero System, the company already enables sales managers and sellers to dynamically evaluate and price inventory. Clear Channel Radio and Google today separately announced Viero Systems full AdSense for Audio Compatibility.

This agreement complements an existing online advertising partnership in which Google provides text ads to Clear Channel’s radio-station Web sites through the company’s Online Music & Radio Unit.

Miguel Helft at the New York Times has a relatively long and interesting article, with some interesting details, that rounds up the status and mixed results (so far) of Google’s moves into radio, TV and print newspapers. From my understanding, the print newspaper ads have been the most successful to date.

Newspapers and Radio Find Unlikely Ally in Google from Advertising Age shows how both advertisers and publishers are very happy with early tests from both Google’s Print Ads and Google’s Audio Ads.

On the print side, the article shares quotes from the New York Times claiming Google Print ads have “worked” and that they have generated “incremental revenue from an advertiser base that we don’t usually get revenue from.” The Seattle Times has told Advertising Age that they have “produced six-figure incremental ad revenue” from this program. Also, we have quotes from small business that have claimed the print ad tests have worked for them. One advertiser said “we are very pleased with the results” and that they “going to bump up the spend.”

On the radio side, the article has small business claiming Google Audio ads give him a “reassuring and comforting feeling to have a system so efficient and easy.” This allows him to feel more willing to participate in radio ads. But on the publisher side, radio stations are “scared to death” of Google.