Google Buys Radio Ad Company

And between the music here's an advert..... "ViAgRa...cheap Viagra", "Play 3D poker online for Free, Free Las Vegas poker trips, prizes"...

CNet reports that Google is to buy a radio ad company (DMarc Broadcasting) for $102 Million Dollars. They go on to say that with additional payments this may rise to $1.1 Billion Dollars. Ah here's a quote from Google...

"Google is committed to exploring new ways to extend targeted, measurable advertising to other forms of media," Tim Armstrong, Google's vice president of advertising sales, said in a release.

Personally I don't think it will work. Sure you can see where this is going. Targeted ads which are analysed through speech recognition and broken down into socio economic status, geography, time of day, etc and then depending on the type of person who listens to the station the correct ad is played back. It all sounds good but the reason why it wont work is because listening to the radio is different than coming across an ad on a website. When you see a Google Ad on a site you are ready to click on the next thing that catches your eye.

When a relevant advert from Google comes across you dont think twice and click on it as if it were a link from the article or from an email itself. However, the same cannot be said for radio stations, TV, etc. It's not possible in my view to use the advert to start off the long tail effect that Google has created through simple text based ads since Radio and TV advertisement is more of branding and awareness than of putting people through the front door. I'll prob be proved wrong but this my argument regardless.