Display advertisements are good: Google

After three years of R&D and some frenetic M&A, Google claims it delivers wide array of services as far as display advertising is concerned.

The search giant is keen to pocket a hefty slice of India’s online advertising market, an Rs 1,300 crore market in 2011 that is set to touch Rs 3,400 crore by 2015 according to KPMG estimates. “At a micro level, online display advertising, which constitutes of banner ads, sponsorship links, rich media and digital video, is a sizeable portion of the total advertising market and has got us very excited for India this year,” says Daniel Alegre, president, Japan and Asia-Pacific operations of Google.

Starting last year, Google’s revenue growth reflected a strong hold in display and mobile advertising. Company’s display revenue increased by an estimated 61 per cent during 2010, boosted by the success of Google’s subsidiaries YouTube and DoubleClick. On the mobile ad side, Google is benefiting from the increasing popularity of the Android operating system and the AdMob acquisition.

India has become the most promising growth markets for technology and social networking companies due to its young and increasingly affluent population of nearly 80 million active internet users and 750 million mobile subscribers.

Recognizing the fact that mobile internet in India is on a fast track– an estimated 40 million users access internet from mobile – Alegre maintains that Google Goggles, a way to search the web on mobile devices just by taking a picture, could be the next big thing in display advertising on mobile. He explains, “Google Goggles could one day enable advertisers to deliver great display ads to users. Imagine pointing your phone’s camera at an ad for a car in a magazine, and having the car appear in 3D in your mobile device. Or pointing at a movie poster and having the movie trailer play in the device, right in your hand.”

With YouTube a major ad provider, supported by the DoubleClick Exchange, Google plans to be at the forefront of this market too. Alegre lists that the company had earlier demonstrated new video ad formats on YouTube called TrueView. “These were rolled out last year. These formats give people option to skip an ad if they don’t want to watch, or to choose from multiple ads the one they want to watch. Importantly, advertisers pay only if user chooses to watch their advert,” he says.

Alegre, while careful not to say too much about Google’s future plans for display, did add that Indian advertisers are starting to ask for ads that are tailored to particular audiences. “Many are using real-time bidding technology so that they can bid on the ad space that they think is most valuable. By 2015, 50 per cent of these ads will be bought using this real-time technology,” Alegre noted.

Google’s closest competition comes from Microsoft and Facebook. But Facebook is confined by its platform focus and has shown no interest in integrating with third party tracking and serving tools. Microsoft, while its display investment has been formidable, failed to acquire and integrate display ad technologies as quickly or as effectively as Google.

According to Google’s estimates, its display network reaches more than 80 per cent of global internet users and serving more than 6 billion ad impressions each day across hundreds of thousands of websites. Alegre says, “Google works with advertisers on ad formats because if brands, publishers and media companies have to worry about technical aspect, varying ad sizes and versions coupled with different types of ad serving technologies, it becomes challenging for them to invest.”