by Ben Allen

• Added February 18, 2010

First of all many thanks to the folks who run the show around here for letting me use this space to write about stuff happening in the world where advertising and marketing meet location. I happen to think that there are a lot of interesting things already happening in this space, and what we’re seeing is only the tip of the iceberg, but hey I could be wrong, it certainly wouldn’t be the first time THAT happened!

Having spent a little time with a major media company that produces crappy reality television shows, I can appreciate the value of lowest common denominator programming, so in that spirit why don’t we kick things off here by talking about Google, everyone knows them, has an opinion on them, and most importantly wants to read stuff about what they’re up to.

For those interested in the use of location in marketing, Google is particularly interesting not just because they’re the 7th largest company in the U.S. (by market cap) and a leader in the advertising industry, but because they’re the 7th largest company in the U.S., a leader in the advertising industry and have a CEO that says stuff like location based advertising is a “huge revolution”, “the recreation of the Internet, it's the recreation of the PC story” (Eric Schmidt, Davos 2008).

Great, so now you want to know the latest and greatest about the “Geo” efforts happening at Google. The best place to get it is first hand by simply reading their LatLong Blog, which is constantly updated with the latest Google-y Geo developments… and I mean constantly, those guys seem to announce a new Geo thingamajig once a week.

There are various opinions out there about where Google is going with all their Geo oriented products, Are they really trying to get into the different businesses of aggregating map data and competing with Navteq? Or getting into the handset business and competing with Nokia? Or entering the Navigation business to compete with Garmin or TomTom? I for one don’t think so, I believe them when they say that it’s simply about organizing the world information… that and trying to better tap into the massive local advertising market.

People are accessing the world’s information in many ways besides a browser on a PC nowadays, and at the same time the world’s information isn’t being all that agreeable and refuses to jump out of our collective heads and systems, digitize itself and land nicely onto a handy and conveniently indexable and linkable webpage. Extracting that information takes effort, and that’s a big part of what Google needs in order to grow. So even if you’re not in the advertising or marketing field, it may be useful just to keep an eye on what they’re up to, simply because they have a ton of money and talent to spend on creating things and giving them away for free in the hopes of drilling around and one day hitting that new huge oil field of un-tapped information in need of organization. If the route to that oil field is through your back yard, it’s something you’ll want to see coming, just ask the guys in the mapping and navigation world.

As innovative and powerful as Google is, I think that if they have a weakness, it’s that they’re too oriented toward the ways of the current web... you know… things like html pages and hypertext links. Nearly anything that can be written or printed can be digitized and linked to on the web, and Google is trying like crazy to help that process along in anyway it can. But some very useful information like the location of a speeding truck (where is my delivery?) or the fact that you ate at your local Applebees five times last month, could be a goldmine for marketers, yet don’t lend themselves well to the creation of webpages, so Google still has some figuring out to do. With my next post I’ll take a brief look at what Google PageRank could look like for a mobile location aware advertising oriented delivery product, and why Google may not be the best company to create it.