11 Feb 2010

Google Buzz: Why advertising may never be the same again

Google Buzz is as close to a perfect advertising platform as you can get.

There is so much content, profiling data, and spatial information to narrow down the context and relevance of an advertising message. In fact, it has the potential to be so perfectly aligned to a target that it would not even even look or feel like advertising!

It is out-of-context, irrelevant advertising that is obtrusive and annoying. But if a brand's messsge is relevant and in context, it would actually be welcome! Imagine you're at a mall and you get a message, saying: "'X' (a Gmail contact) is at Starbucks on Level 1." Is it even an ad anymore?

And since it's a social network and a geo-spatial network platform, WOM or adoption could potentially return exponential results! So ALL your friends in the area could land up at Starbucks!

Google Buzz, of course will not change advertising entirely. It would definitely be the most effective, but we'll still need entertainment and news to be paid-for by mostly out-of-context, irrelevant ads.

If Buzz picks up like I expect it will (because unlike Google Wave, the beauty of Buzz is that it is integrated into gmail!) Google could turn Nexus One into a Buzz-based 'mobile-social-internet device', where geo-tagging is replaced with GPS.

Of course, this is all just theoretical stuff...

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