What new technologies are businesses likely to leverage in the near future to help market their company's products and services? Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) has some ideas.
The search giant's made billions of dollars over the years via systems that place relevant text ads next to user's search results. More recently, it's been looking to richer display advertising as the next great frontier of opportunity. Google has been ramping up new display ad services as part of its Google Display Network as it looks to take on take on market leaders Facebook and Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) and others.
The stakes are huge. The research firm comScore (NASDAQ: SCORE) reported earlier this year that U.S. consumers received over a trillion display ads in the first quarter of 2010, up 15 percent from a year ago.
Another research firm, eMarketer, says the U.S. display ad market is set to grow 12.9 percent to $8.56 billion this year, up from $7.6 billion in 2009. By 2014, eMarketer forecasts display ad spending will reach $14.71 billion. Google predicts the global market for online display advertising will grow to $50 billion by 2015.
Google said in a blog post this week that it thinks "display advertising is about to go through the biggest and most important revolution in its history."
As a follow up to "Display 2015: Smart and Sexy" presentation it made recently at an advertising conference, the blog reveals how Google sees ad formats and consumption changing in the years ahead -- think social, personalized and real-time.
In five years, Google expects that 75 percent of ads on the Web will be "social" and broadly distributed across multiple formats and sites. Social features will include the ability to comment, share, discuss and recommend specifics ads to friends or a broader social network.
Another Google prediction is that by 2015 at least half of all online ad campaigns will include video ads that advertisers will only pay for (on a cost-per-view basis) if the user chooses to watch them. Google is already testing a new cost-per-view video ad format on YouTube called TrueView that's due to go live later this year. TrueView gives users the choice of skipping an ad or choosing from multiple ads.
Google also expects that real-time bidding technology will continue to advance, designed to help advertisers tailor ads to specific audiences. "In 2015, 50 percent of these ads will be bought using this real-time technology," the blog said.
"Display advertising really is at the heart of what we’re doing at Google these days," said Neal Mohan, Google's vice president of product management and Barry Salzman, managing director of Media & Platforms for the Americas, the blog's co-authors.
David Needle is the West Coast bureau chief at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.
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