Google branches out into print ads

Updated

Gee, we gushed last week about Google being on a roll, but turns out there is more. Leadership in online advertising is not enough for the insatiable company. It’s now muscling its way into the offline world too, delivering ads for print publications, beginning with PC Magazine (shows an example). Here’s our story for the Mercury News (free registration) today about it.

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The picture here is from the “Blackjack Card Counting” ad that showed up in the example linked to above. Got to wonder whether that would have made it into PC Mag without Google’s help.

Notable was how much a small business advertiser like Jeff Witkowski gets a kick out of being associated with Google, even in print…

…Witkowski, president of AHS Systems, which makes online content management software, was another of the advertisers who split an ad page in PC Magazine. As you’ll see in this link to another example, there is text at the top or bottom of the ads that says “Ads by Google.” But the plain text wasn’t as strong as Witkowski would have liked it. `”We would have loved to have seen the Google logo,” Witkowski told us. “We’d hoped to get a bit more of a punch.”

In other words, advertisers are probably willing to pay a premium for the perceived Google endorsement, giving Google a competitive advantage, even in print. As we note in the story, Google can now act as a one-stop shop for advertisers in offline and online, and with its interests in TV and broadband growing, there are so many new directions Google can go — and with its automated ad-bidding system, it could wring out a whole bunch of inefficiencies in the bloated offline advertising world.

Will there be not stop to the Google juggernaut?

Update: Om, as usual, connects the dots. We didn’t have space in our piece to go into how Google is using toll-free numbers within its ads, but Om elaborates here about how it fits in with Google’s move into talk/VoIP. A Google user who finds an interesting ad with phone number can just call using Google’s new phone offerings, and Google has an even easier/cheaper way track performance of the ad, and possibly all kinds of other things. Coin is still dropping…