VIA Interaction

Wednesday, April 12, 2006

Finding your audience online

Not surprisingly, our bricks-and-mortar clients want their advertisements to be seen by the people who they can do business with. With online advertising, that has been a difficult proposition. How do you know where someone looking at your Web page lives?

Most of the big advertisers offer "geo-targeting" as an option, but that solution is iffy at best right now. You can guess where someone might be based on the location of their Internet gateway. (Web sites think our Portland, Maine, office is in New York City.) The big portals know more about you if you've registered with them (and provided accurate profile information).

Google is targeting local advertisers, the revenue side of the "long tail." That's what its plan to provide free Wi-Fi access in San Francisco is all about.

If you are sitting at a sidewalk cafe in San Francisco with your laptop and you do a Google search, Google will know exactlly where you are send you advertisements for the business two doors down.

This is good news for small advertisers, but good news for our large customers, too.

It is bad news for the newspaper industry, which is already getting crushed by online jobs sites like Monster.com and classified-ad systems like Craigslist.

Read more about Google's Wi-Fi plans in InformationWeek: San Fran Wi-Fi To Put Google's Ad Strategy To The Test.

posted by Tim Beidel at 4/12/2006 10:09:00 AM

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