There is no question that Google is disrupting traditional media in amazing ways. But I have a quibble with this comment:
Auletta illustrates that with an anecdote about Viacom Chief Executive Mel Karmazin’s visit to Google. The media mogul is aghast at Google’s ability to precisely track the effectiveness of ads, replacing the intangible qualities of emotion, aura and psychology with metrics and thereby demystifying the traditional ad man’s sales pitch.
I’m not arguing that rationalism doesn’t have a place in marketing and ad sales. At the same time, however, I defy you to name me one google ad you’ve seen that you’ve mentioned to friends, or laughed at or that has otherwise changed how you think about a product?
You can’t do it.
Emotion, aura and psychology do count.
Insofar as the goal of an add is to make you buy the product that’s being advertised, that the add be memorable, funny or emotionally evocative is not what makes it effective. That it makes you buy the product is.
Whether you remember the last Google add you saw, or even any at all, doesn’t matter to them. That it makes people buy stuff is what matters and having effective adds is how Google makes money.
I remember a Superbowl commercial where cowboys where herding cats.
Did I ever buy anything from EDS? Nope. Do I even know who EDS was? Nope. Now that I do, do I have plans on building a company intranet on par with the U.S. Navy or MI5? Nope.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pk7yqlTMvp8
Does seeing an add for a highly related (well sometimes) product in gmail make me want to click on it? Sometimes it does. Does it equal a full-on conversion. Rarely. Very rarely. But as far as someone getting paid, just the click is doing that and it is very easy to measure a host of metrics revolving around it.
That TV ad might look pretty, but the ROI is far more speculative when you are basing them on emotion, aura, psychology, etc. rather than hard data which very well may be the math that definitively backs up the emotion and such.
Karmazin sees a girl selling beer. Google sees F 36-26-36 selling C2H5OH.