google video ads

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google announced that they will be releasing a new pay-per-click video ad product today. initially, i thought that this would be a cool thing. but, on second thought, i’m not sure.

for advertisers, this may or may not be a good thing. to produce a video is not trivial; it’s easier than it used to be, but it still requires work, time, and money. the idea is for an advertiser to produce a flash video, then google will make that video available as an ad product alonside the other ad units in adsense. for each click, the advertiser pays google and the adsense publisher makes a little also. here’s the problem: current adsense ad units — when clicked — brings the clicker to a website of interest. this isn’t the case with video ads. with video ads, the clicker clicks on the video, then the video plays. i always welcome funny and amusing video clips, but from an advertisers point of view, i imagine that i’d want some user action or roi from the clicked video. if nothing else, google video ads can be an effective means of brand awareness, but might not actually lead to purchase conversions from ad clicks. how do you quantify brand awareness? well, the advertiser could, at a later time, always sponsor a perceptual map or brand check-up study, but that only helps the advertiser learn about the brand penetration.

here’s the bottom line: sales. online ad units that bring the clicker to a website are meant or designed for purchase conversions. maybe the goal of google video ads is to help increase the advertiser’s brand awareness. it might actually be a cheaper way to do that and perhaps an effective & viral way of spreading the brand. we’ll see.

for google, i think increasing the ad selection and types is always a good thing. this move increases the types and broadens google’s revenue potential by providing more ad types.

for the public, i’m not sure. if there’s a funny or interesting ad — maybe superbowl commercial on a google video ad — then that might be cool to watch. this scenario might encourage “click” with no action, just to see a video. this means money in the publishers pockets, money in google’s pockets, but money out of the advertiser’s pockets — for what, amusement, not necessarily sales.

arrington chimed in on google video ads. arrington isn’t bullish on google video ads. on the other hand, peter cashmore of mashable takes a different line than arrington — cashmore believes that google should go with the youtube model of peer-produced videos. i think that sound interesting and fun, but there’s no money in that for google. the whole idea is for google to act as the venue by which advertisers push their brand and products through. i frankly don’t understand cashmore’s argument. the social web is fascinating, but i don’t think cashmore is being pragmatic in this instance. jensense provides a nice summary and thoughts on google video ads.

below is an example of the google video ads product. the product is now available to advertisers, but it might be sometime before we see any available as an adsense ad unit.

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