Google Is Blackmail

The way I see it, Google is a brilliantly executed extortion racket.

The key concept to understand is that Google makes its money through misdirection.

They get nothing for directing you to the most accurate search result. They get paid to artfully direct you away from the most accurate search result.

Natural (free) search takes you to the most likely thing you're searching for, according to their algorithms. Paid search takes you to the person who was willing to pay the most for the term you are searching. It is misdirection.

They are very clever about this. If the misdirection is too obvious or egregious, you'll lose confidence in them and search elsewhere. They walk a fine line, and are careful about just how much misdirection is acceptable.

Of course, they would disagree. They would tell you that natural search is "search" and paid search is "advertising." That may be technically true, but from a consumer's point of view it is essentially a distinction without a difference.

Here's where the blackmail comes in.

Let's say you own a Ford dealership. When someone in your area Googles "Ford" or "Focus" or "F-150" naturally you'd expect your dealership to pop up pretty close to the top in the results.

But it might not. If a Chevy dealer in your neighborhood bid on the term "F-150" and you didn't, his listing would appear in the paid search area of the page on top of yours. His link might misdirect a searcher to an offer on a Silverado. So someone shopping for a Ford truck winds up looking at an ad for a Chevy truck.

What's the consequence of this? You need to protect your turf. So you wind up paying for the term "F-150" that should rightfully be yours.

They get you to pay for what's yours by the implicit threat of selling it to someone else. It's blackmail, and it's brilliant.


Who Loves Ya?
...I know I threatened to pollute today's post with promotion for my books, but I decided to give you a break. You've had a tough enough week without my whining.

Advertising In Support Of Content

In a recent exciting episode of The Ad Contrarian called Web Litter: Now It's Content, we discussed how previously ineffectual online marketing activities have been resurrected as the latest web marketing miracle -- "content."

We said,

"Previously they were just litter blowing unnoticed through the dark, dusty corridors of the web. But now that they have been promoted to "content" they are once again awesome."

The theory behind the rebirth of "content" goes like this,

"Content...is a demonstration of your like-mindedness with your customer. It shows that you have a "shared-purpose" with her...and because your customer appreciates it so much she will engage with your brand and become a huge fan of your company."

Sadly we also did a little calculation,

"...there are over one trillion pages of "content" on the web...

If the average consumer devours one page of "content" every fifteen minutes, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, it will take her over 27 million years to get around to your content."

Since most CMOs these days don't last 27 minutes, 27 million years seems like an unrealistically long horizon. By that time, Microsoft may have figured out how to get line-spacing right in Powerpoint. Or Papa John may have learned how to act.

But I digress...

Fortunately, for today's savvy marketing virtuoso there’s a way to move your content right up to the front of the line and avoid the 27 million year wait. How? By promoting it with advertising.

It's simple. You buy advertising that lets your target audience know where your content is. Then they find your content, they experience it and, bingo, they fall in love.

So instead of using your advertising budget to promote your product, you can now join the forward thinking marketers who use it to promote their content.

(PAUSE...THINK...PAUSE...)

Wait a minute, you say. That’s f/ing crazy!

You're asking me to promote my content instead of my product? But I don't sell content, I sell products. Why should I spend money to promote my content, which is just an indirect way of promoting my products, when I can use the money to promote my products directly?...Even marketing people can't be that stupid, you say...

Oh, my friend, but that's where you're wrong.

And I can prove it in just two classical, wonderful, elegant, joyous words which have been sadly missing from this chronicle recently: Pepsi Refresh.

God I miss those people. 

Warning: Tomorrow's post is going to be devoted to hustling my books. Come armed.

We're Number Wonderful

This past weekend I decided to try to find out where this blog stood in the cosmic heirarchy. I don't know why -- probably status anxiety or some other post-modern disorder.

So I went to a website called the Ad Age Power 150 which purports to rank the 150 most powerful ad blogs in the world. The Power 150 had 1,137 blogs listed. Right away I knew there was going to be trouble.

If you think that 1,137 is somewhere between 1 and 150, I don't think you're in a good position to be publishing arithmetic calculations.

Nonetheless, I soldiered on. Digging a little deeper, I found The Ad Contrarian at number 61. This was disappointing as I was hoping to be #1 with a bullet. To make myself feel better I decided that I needed to augment their unreliable math with some computations of my own.

First, I got rid of all the blogs that weren't written in the USA. You see, I've been watching the presidential debates and one thing I've learned from paying close attention is that the USA is the greatest country ever invented in the history of the whole universe and beyond.

I've also learned that God loves the USA and we are blessed by him. So, not wanting to piss God off, I threw out all those blogs written by people whom God does not love. That eliminated 17 and got me down to number 44. I started feeling better already.

Next I tossed every blog that had "social media" or "conversation" in the title. Anyone who can stand to read that crap is not someone I want reading my blog anyway. Now I'm sitting at 41.

Then I got rid of all the blogs that had the words "search engine" in them. I don't know what the hell search engine marketing is supposed to be, but one thing I know for sure -- it ain't advertising. Now I'm number 34.

Then I shit-canned all the blogs that weren't really about advertising -- stuff like content and data and whatever this week's magic buzzword is. That was huge. Now I'm down to number 20.

Analyzing the top 20, I made a very insightful observation. One quarter of them had the writer's name as the title. This seemed unnecessarily narcissistic. For this reason I felt it my duty to disqualify them. So now I'm number 15.

Checking the 14 advertising blogs ahead of me, I couldn't help notice that there wasn't a single one of them that I had ever read. Not one.

So I decided this Ad Age Power 150 thing was a bunch of bullshit. I convened a meeting of The Ad Contrarian board of directors. After a great deal of discussion and compromise, we decided that we would publish our own ranking: The Ad Contrarian Power 1,137.

It's going to take us a while to calculate the rankings. But I'm pretty sure who number one is going to be.

By The Way...
If you don't get enough of my bullshit here on the blog, there's an interview that was published yesterday by Mitch Joel at Six Pixels Of Separation, which you can find here.