August 23rd, 2006
Google CEO on ad sales execs: Google 'targeted ads' better
Google’s search dominance has led many to believe it will be the “killer” of any category it cares to enter: classifieds, e-mail, calendars…
The one sector Google is actually succeeding in disrupting, however, gets little attention: advertising sales.
Google believes it is in the best interests of all to displace ad sales execs with Google ads.
For Google CEO Eric Schmidt, a “targeted ad” is better than a “targeted sales person.”
Schmidt put forth his views on how the Google targeted advertising system makes ad sales execs dispensable at a NYC meeting with publishing industry execs in June:
As people see targeted advertising as a way of selling they shift sales dollars, not marketing dollars, into advertising. Literally, they would put advertising dollars into Google rather than hiring a sales person…
Eventually we would hope that a targeted ad would be better than a targeted sales person; The ad can serve 24 hours a day, the ad can serve anywhere, and the ad is cheaper. The ad doesn’t require a lot of management overhead and is much more cost effective to deploy.
There are a lot of products where traditional sales forces can be diminished.
Google’s aim to displace today’s Willy Lomans of the world via the Google advertising machine is steadily being realized.
How is Google spurring “Death of a Salesman” 2.0?
Google AdSense is displacing in-house direct sales teams at thousands of Web sites, large and small (see “Facebook outsources ad sales to Microsoft: Why can’t it make money on its own?”).
The Fox MySpace property has sub-contracted $900 million in advertising sales to Google (see “Google: MySpace savior?”)
Even salesperson-friendly Web-based applications such as Salesforce.com are using the Google advertising system in ways that spur a net reduction of sales execs.
Salesforce.com has introduced Salesforce for Google AdWords. According to the company:
service that combines the dynamic creation of Google AdWords with the on-demand business applications of salesforce.com. Salesforce for Google AdWords…an end-to-end, on-demand service that allows companies to create, manage, and measure search engine marketing campaigns, all from directly within Salesforce.
Salesforce for Google AdWords enables the displacement of Search Engine Marketing firms’ sales representatives.
