Traditional advertisers, wedded to the concept of imagery, took a long time to come around to the whole idea of simple text-only ads. You couldn’t pick up a trade rag without someone bleating that display ads were better for branding etc. Basically, everyone in advertising loves sparkle and gloss and picture of old men frolicking in fields of wheat with their rosy-cheeked grand-daughters in slo-mo, and 35 characters of text is just so damn boring. So, PPC experts happily mopped up the business that these guys weren’t interested in, and created a whole new industry for themselves.
Meanwhile, back at the Googleplex, Google’s own designers were presumably getting bored of serving text ads and over the last year or two have been busily rolling out a variety of seldom-seen formats like embedded video ads etc. Today I saw their latest wheeze… to whit, a crazy kind of AdWords/Product feed crossover:
I kind sorta quite like the idea in principle, but this is yielding a *hell* of a lot of screen real estate to an individual advertiser, even if it is only optional in response to a click.
To me, I think this looks more like a glimpse into the future of Google Products than it does AdWords. Sorting out the relevancy of what products to show in this expanded kind of listing seems like it would be a helluva lot of work to me.
Since writing this, I’ve discovered that you can basically tag your product feed to show up in AdWords, so the process is actually pretty simple.