NYT survey's Google's move into traditional media

The New York Times has published an excellent review of Google's move into the offline ad market. What's the strategy?

Google is building a TV ad sales team, have radio and print in beta, and their recent purchases for video game advertising, YouTube and other buys show they are building a company that really wants to be an all-encompassing media company. The NYT is one of the major media brands using them.

The most profitable area is thought to be likely to be TV, especially with trials of demographically targeted cable ads to individuals.

The area they're having the most trouble is Radio. There they are:

suspicious that its technology-based approach will turn their business into a commodity and take away the relationships with advertisers that stations have spent years building.

Which is an interesting reflection of other comment about how the Google brand is morphing into Big Brother, with comment pieces quoting Sun Tzu as an anti-Google strategy source. There are thousands of 'Victim of own sucess?' stories.

The piece concludes that Google has ad technology competition and, at the moment, it's offline ad share is tiny. So no need to panic yet then.