Google Working on Intergrating Video Ads Into Search Results

September 10th, 2007 - Jeffrey Henderson

During CitiGroup's Technology Summit last week Nicholas Fox, Google's Business Product Manager for Ads Quality, announced that the search giant will be moving forward with their plans to incorporate video and image ads into their sponsored results.

While studies have shown that the majority of users will stop watching a video within 10 seconds if there is an ad displayed, giving the end user a choice between text ads and video ads is uncharted territory which Google seems eager to explore. According to Fox, "It's a topic that's come up in a lot of internal discussions."

We want to do the best job of conveying information to the user. In many cases that's a text ad. In some cases it may not be a text ad. It may be an image, it may be a video, it may be something else. The risk, though, is that we don't want to show things that are garish or flashy, or other things that might cause users to become blind to the ads.

As an example, Fox gave this scenario:

You could think of a local butcher. Maybe a 10-word text ad explaining that local butcher's business probably is not going to be enticing and get the user to click on the ad. But if you could have a video of the butcher explaining his business and showing all this fresh meat...then maybe the user would get much more value out of that. And the advertiser would also get more value as well.

As eager as Google is to begin full implementation of this new advertising medium, Fox went on to say, "My expectation is that we'll do some more thinking around this area and potentially some experiments. Expect a scenario where we'll move extremely cautiously, though."

We're definitely excited to see Google's video and image ads in the wild, and we'll have updates as soon as that happens.