I’ve always believed that the day that online advertising can target live conversation, online advertising will hit the ROI pinnacles it deserves along with pissing off every privacy advocate in the world.
Can you imagine? You’re using Google Talk to discuss which restaurant to go to in Washington DC for dinner, debating over Afghani or Thai. As you’re holding the conversation, Google serves advertisements to specific restaurants in the DC area, or restaurant comparison sites. Heck, maybe there’s even a Thai-Afghani place right down the street.
The usefulness of conversation targeted advertising would be valuable to the end user as much as it would be to the Google AdWords department or to the advertiser. But do we want Google monitoring our private conversations?
- Google already scans our GMail and archived Google Talk conversations to serve relevant advertising in the GMail interface
- The MySpace Google deal gives Google access to our hobbies, jobs and favorite TV shows, helping to serve targeted advertising to our behavioral tendencies and emotional relationships.
So actually, serving ads to a live messenger application that are targeted to our live conversations wouldn’t be that far off wouldn’t it? Seriously, if Yahoo could serve ads in Yahoo Messenger based on what people were talking about, it would probably save the company. Is that day now? Is it time to lift the restrictions and let the dogs out?
Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable stumbled across this screenshot a blogger took of AOL’s AIM messenger serving Google AdSense ads.
Barry’s not too convinced that this is a real advertisement and may be photoshopped, but with AOL’s recent problems and layoffs, and AOL being a Google partner, couldn’t expanding Google ads to messenger help the company big time?
As a matter of fact; Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, AOL and numerous International messaging clients could develop a new targeted revenue generation which would substantially help these companies in a horrible world economy.
I think in 2009 we will see the expansion of contextual advertising and the acceptance of some new user profiling, will live messenger ads be part of this mix?
