Owen on digital media: If you'd been thinking Google was powerful before, think again

Revolution UK, 14 July 2008, 00:00am

Who said interruptive advertising was dead? Who said it was no longer viable for brands to rely on the conventional model of 'piggy-backing' on original content to reach their target audience? That brands had to go out of their way now to engage and entertain those audiences themselves?

Me, probably, in one of these columns. And countless others besides me. At the risk of overstating the case, the point of making these arguments has been to awaken brand owners to the reality that media spend alone is not enough when the media landscape is so fragmented and the user/viewer is so in control.

But Google, one of the pioneers of user empowerment, may just have found a way of revitalising the piggy-back model. Google Content Network uses the company's proprietary AdSense system to distribute content, rather than ads, to a targeted audience. The AdSense sales team then sells advertising within or around this content at a huge premium.

So far, so intriguing. But it gets really exciting when you realise that the first content to be distributed in this way will be the latest invention of Seth MacFarlane - the writer of Family Guy. Dubbed "Seth MacFarlane's Cavalcade of Comedy", it will consist of instalments described by its creator as "animated versions of the one-frame cartoons you might see in The New Yorker, only edgier."

The budget for the series, which consists of 50 two-minute episodes, is reputed to stretch into multiple millions of dollars. MacFarlane has not only created the episodes themselves but is also working with advertisers to animate some of the ads that will run within or around them. The snippets will be distributed to thousands of sites popular with young males, as well as on YouTube. The whole thing promises to be a phenomenon.

Kim Malone Scott, the director of sales and operations for AdSense, sums it up when he says, in The New York Times: "We feel that we have recreated the mass media." I never would have thought it possible, but I think he might have a point.

At a stroke, the mass audience model of advertising is about to be re-invented. No longer are those audiences to be found in one channel or one website, but Google has the technology to find them wherever they are. Blimey. And you thought Google was powerful before?

- John Owen is planning partner of digital agency Dare and a fellow of the IPA. Email: john_owen@daredigital.com.