February MarketingMasters Luncheon Report

Google’s Price Visualizes Web 2.0 for B-to-B Marketers

By Don Talend
Write Results

An unconventional format at BMA’s March luncheon seminar suited Google’s Penry Price and Jim Lecinski just fine, and not just because Google is emblematic of the unconventional Internet Age. The freewheeling, strictly question-and-answer format gave the two executives an opportunity to peer into a crystal ball and visualize the high-tech future of marketing along with the audience.

Price, Google’s vice president of advertising sales for North America, and Lecinski, its central region managing director, said Google is wielding its data-gathering technologies to help marketers make a quantum leap in customer targeting capabilities in the future.

Price’s prior advertising experience included stints at Us Weekly and Rolling Stone. He succeeded Tim Armstrong in his current position when Armstrong was named president of advertising and commerce for North America. Price is frequently quoted in various industry print publications and online media and most recently appeared on the cover of the March 17, 2008, digital issue of Advertising Age along with other “Kings of the Wild Frontier.”

Lecinski, who has more than 20 years of integrated marketing experience and previously worked for Young & Rubicam, served as the moderator at the session. He read Price questions that members submitted either ahead of time or during the meeting. Topics ranged from Google’s relationship with b-to-b marketers to the company’s various acquisitions to its range of information services that are available to b-to-b marketers.

Price was first asked how Google should be categorized: as a search company, an advertising company or a technology company. His answer was threefold.

First, he said Google believes it has earned the trust of both consumers and marketers to the point where both would like it to continue to innovate. Second, “What we’re thinking about is making the right connection with your message or any marketer’s message with the exact right consumer at the exact right time,” said Price. “It’s a very difficult challenge, but if marketers think of us that way, that’s actually good for us.” Third, Google should be thought of as a publisher of content, with products such as Google News and Google Finance, and it is trying to help its publishing partners develop their Web sites into revenue streams.

When asked for advice on customer targeting, Price shared Google’s vision of what the perfect online search tool would provide: one query, one answer. Getting there is going to take time, Price added, but Google plans to increasingly refine its colossal data volume for its partners to move the vision closer to reality. This way, Google can add more filters to the b-to-b marketer’s targeting capabilities, Price said.

He added that two currently available products, Google Trends and Google Analytics, can be useful to the b-to-b marketer. Google Trends gives the user access to the company’s aggregated data, indicating what potential targets are searching for. Google Analytics provides a partner with specific data indicating how visitors use the partner’s own site. Another product that is potentially useful to b-to-b marketers is Google Patent Search, he noted.

Price said he sees significant potential partnering opportunities between Google and b-to-b marketers, who rely on quantitative analytical data for market segmentation to begin with.

“Your alignment is with the financial side of the business,” he noted. “Metrics have been in your world; you’ve tracked analytics for the company CFO for trade shows. The more people are using our search engines and technologies, the smarter we become.

“We have taken some steps to address the need to be smarter with relevant results,” Price continued.
“Google Scholar is one. It goes through various books and publications that people otherwise wouldn’t be searching.” This tool searches a wide collection of technical papers and books on a specific topic that the b-to-b marketer searches.

He also referred to another tool that is potentially useful in b-to-b marketing: Google Co-op, which allows both a company and site visitors to customize searches on a Web site based on visitors’ targeting criteria. “You can put a search engine in your own site and control the environment in which those results come in, meaning you choose which results are relevant to your business,” Price said. “It’s like a feed.”

Several questions related to recent strategic moves by Google. The company’s 2007 acquisition of DoubleClick was an important one because it gives Google the capability to reach targets with online banner and display ads as well as track consumers’ online behavior. For the b-to-b marketer, the deal should provide the capability to budget more money for online advertising, given the involvement in this arena by a company with Google’s reach.

The 2006 acquisition of YouTube is providing Google with a huge repository of video content, Price said, noting that 10 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. After refining YouTube into the best possible video-sharing tool, Price said, the next step will be to help partners develop revenue streams from it.
The b-to-b marketer can already benefit from using YouTube to demonstrate product uses at trade shows, Price argued. Of the 2007 acquisition of FeedBurner, Price said he sees tremendous potential in merging Google’s new online advertising capabilities with user-requested feeds. “If I’m going to sign up for feeds to come to me, that’s a pretty engaged audience,” he said.

The 700-megahertz broadband spectrum auction that began in January 2008 will ultimately benefit the consumer, who wants to have the same access to rich Web content on a cell phone as on a laptop. Price compared today’s cell-phone-accessible Internet with the circa-2000 Internet stage, saying that cellular service providers give consumers about the same limited access to the Internet that Web portals and Internet service providers did in the Web 1.0 era.

Price said Google’s development of publishing tools such as Google Print Ads, which is said to give marketers advertising access to the print versions of U.S. newspapers read by 70% of newspaper readers, should benefit the struggling publishing industry. The next development stage for this product will be innovating a way to provide effective response mechanisms for the ads, he added.
Don Talend is president of Write Results, a print and e-communications project management company based in West Dundee, Ill.