Digital: Get-Rich-Quick Ads Steal Google's Brand Equity

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 08:17:25 -0800

Advertising Age - In a world of double-digit unemployment and old-line industries in mid-collapse, here's a sales pitch tailor-made for the times: Get Paid by Google. When you create systems that are almost totally automated, lots of well-meaning customers are going to do very well by using your system the right way, and so will scammers, spammers, and con men. But the online and search advertising industries are fundamentally flawed to begin with: generally they're based on traffic, which can be artificially generated in dozens of illegitimate ways. These industries invite all sorts of criminally-minded cretins who are extremely good at inventing ways to game the systems. Why? Because that's where the money is. At the same time, I have to note that this article appears in AdAge, one of the last bastions of the old advertising world, you know the one that's dying a slow death by millions of digital paper cuts, because they can't do things like provide their clients with the campaign analytics that a firm like Google can. Everyone wants to measure the effectiveness of their ads, but few can provide the numbers like Google and other online ad firms. It's not surprising that you'll find an anti-Google piece, here. Google is one of the biggest advertising operations on the planet today, but they don't even need to talk to AdAge, and they probably don't give two squirts about what AdAge thinks. Ha!

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Digital: Get-Rich-Quick Ads Steal Google's Brand Equity