The class today on display advertising got me thinking about the how valuable Google Now* could be. So far I thought of it only as an attempt to be an intelligent personal assistant. I primarily use it to stay updated on traffic, weather, and sports scores. All of these are great for the user, but they don't directly bring any revenue to Google.
Lately I have been getting many more suggestions from Google Now. At the moment it is giving me links to real estate research and phone reviews based on my search history, and nearby events in the next couple days based on my location. Once I got past the creepy factor and remembered that I explicitly enabled these features, I realized these suggestions are actually non-intrusive and polite, and could be worth a lot to advertisers.
When we were discussing the most valuable location on web pages for ad placement, it hit me that a spot in Google Now's list could be among the most valuable impressions you can buy. The personal tracking data that Google is getting on phones, especially Android ones, is a great complement to search history and gmail data.
And because they can "push" ads through Google Now, they can show an ad anytime, anywhere. An easy example would be showing restaurant ads right before lunch or dinner. Perhaps a new Italian place opens up, and they want to target those who frequent Italian places. Or maybe they just want to get customers to start craving Italian food right before dinner.
No matter how they do it, I'm sure once this product is more complete Google will find a way to get ads in there.
* On a side note, when I searched for "Google Now" on Google and clicked the first ad, it pointed me to www.google.com/now, which is a broken link. Come on Google Now, manage your ad links!
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