This article was published on January 18, 2010

Will the Nexus One spawn a new advertising world order?


Will the Nexus One spawn a new advertising world order?

nexus-googleAs a digital advertising professional, I believe that the Nexus One will change the way Google’s advertising tools will affect other mobile vendors.

At the launch event, Google clearly mentioned that it will only promote its product using the latest online advertising tools. What have they done so far?

The Nexus One was featured on Google’s homepage, just like the Motorola Droid when it was launched. In fact, as far as I’m aware, these are the only two incidents in which Google placed advertising on their homepage.

The passion for promoting their Nexus One or Android products seems to be way beyond their taboo of not accepting advertising on their homepage. Although it’s absolutely fair, this does prove how far they are willing to go to promote their new mobile.

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I say there are two scenarios that can develop out of this:

  1. The bidding for generic mobile keywords will keep on getting higher and higher, since Nexus One will always be the highest bidder no matter how expensive the keywords get. I have not yet seen an advertiser withdraw from an “eye for an eye” competition, even if Search Engine Marketing cost gets more expensive than display advertising. At the end this is a win-win situation for Google, whatever is spent throughout this competition will come back to Google as revenue.
  2. Nexus One might not bid at all, since it owns the advertising platform, but no doubt their text ads will have the priority. In this case it will have no effect on the cost of the keywords, but how fair and ethical would that be?

And this is just the Adwords part of the story. Their content network is a whole other battleground. Will YouTube, Blogger, maps and the rest of the bunch succumb to the Google monopoly? Does what go around really come around in this case? Will other vendors start leaving the Google advertising platforms and the whole stream will be diverted to other channels like Bing?

At this stage all we can do is guess. Bloody, it will be. How bloody, we’ll have to wait and see!

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