What impact will these little “plus signs” have on your advertising strategy?

Google’s Marissa Mayer, VP of search products and user experience, informed the NY Times last month about Google’s latest SERP feature and testing began the same day. Andy Beal (MarketingPilgrim.com ) and others at SERoundtable were among the first to spot the new video ads today.

The NY Times article also quoted Mayer as saying that…

…text ads are not as effective on pages with search results that include images and video. The eyes of users automatically gravitate to the images more than the text, she said. Now that Google’s main search results pages include more images, video links and other elements, it is more appropriate, she argued, to have corresponding advertising formats.

Rather than “appropriate”, Andy Beal described Google’s latest move of implementing video ads into search results as “Google Getting Greedy…There’s really no other way to dress this up.” Beal suggested that Google’s implementation strategy of “taking a delicate approach” is indeed mandatory.

…walking the fine line between “monetizing its success” and “getting too greedy and alienating its users.” It’s a very fine line - one that the likes of Alta Vista and Excite over-stepped and ended up withering in the shadow of a search engine that had a clean interface.

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Early signs of new things to come from Google. Videos showing up in the search results have a way yet to evolve, but now that it has started, it should be interesting to see how things progress and how far they take it.
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Not exactly a new idea in terms of its social context…I’ve seen free voicemail given to homeless people at least several years ago. But it’s obviously a highly meritable act.

What IS relatively new is the slick phone aggregation service called GrandCentral that Google bought last Summer (2007). I happened to start using about a month ago, and I LOVE it. GrandCentral’s tagline does a great job of explaining: “One Number that rings all your phones. One Voicemail box, all your messages in one place. So Many Features, you won’t believe it”. Yes, there have been several attempts at the “one number, one box” idea (and I’ve tried them), but nothing anywhere this sophisticated, practical and user friendly. And as usual with Google, it’s free.

Google has made an announcement that could help hundreds of homeless people in San Francisco get back on their feet. Every single homeless person in the city will be given a life-long phone number and voicemail.

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If you’re a heavy Gmail user, you’ve probably heard that Google is in the developmental stages of “socializing” Gmail so that it becomes a social network defacto, instead of the wolf in sheep’s clothing that it is now. If you just can’t wait for Gmail’s finished product, one noted PR Media figure has devised a work around.

read more | digg story

Another new niche search engine named pipl.com is focusing specifically on “people information” that is hidden in “The Deep Web“. It is estimated to be 500 times larger than the surface web which is the focus of traditional search engines. A significant component of the information that pipl.com collects comes from hundreds of millions of social network profiles. If you haven’t already, you’d be wise to first do a search on you own name and see what it already makes available to the public about you. Then read the “5 Facts…) if you’re so inclined.
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The Federal Trade Commission approves Google’s buyout plan. Those who fear Google’s growing private data collection don’t.
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Should innovation-minded managers look at the fast-growing Internet company as a model — or an anomaly? This decade’s most re­markable business story has been the rise of Google from the dot-com ashes.
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Image - News.com

In the seemingly waning days of the U.S. government’s antitrust review of the Google-DoubleClick union, consumer groups are lodging a last-minute plea: don’t forget about privacy.
That was the message during a conference call with reporters Tuesday morning hosted by the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the Center for Digital Democracy. read more

Google’s latest videos released that cover some very specific privacy issues on a product-by-product basis. They join some other video content to help grow the Google Privacy Channel on YouTube that was created last month. read more

Viewed by some as a meticulously constructed image campaign waged by Google to overcome lingering user privacy concerns, it’s probably no coincidence that the Don’t Worry Be Happy messages propagate resolutely as the FTC winds up it’s antitrust review of the controversial $3.1 Billion megamerger of Google and Doubleclick.

The New York Times published this FIVE page story almost 48 hours ago, yet only 10 (ten) people have Dugg the article as of this posting…amazing. Maybe holiday shopping has a ring in everyone’s nose (and I do not mean as in body piercing). Or maybe people aren’t considering this to be an epic confrontation that could significantly impact their lives. Ever see the 2004 fictional mini documentary video “Epic 2014: A Futuristic History of the Media“? It contains some amazing similarities with the status quo thus far…definitely worth your 15 minute diversion. Oddly enough, in the video, the NY Times Inc. is posed as the final opponent of “Google-zon”

The growing confrontation promises to be an epic business battle. read more

P.S. Interesting…found this blog post from MG Spiegler four (4) days prior to the NY Times article above. His slant is that the Facebook vs. Google/Opensocial confrontation is just a microcosm of the larger Microsoft vs. Google war.
The Escalation of the Social Networking Proxy War

Google will soon be releasing new system wide profile cards that you can share as little or as much about yourself as you want. Not quite full fledged Social Network Portability, but it’s a step closer.  read more

Image by Google