Why Google Will NEVER Pay For a Local Ad Sales Force
Attention college students! If you believe the latest Google effort to drive local ad sales at virtually no cost to itself is too good to be true, you desereve an A, in hype-busting!
Conventional Google wisdom is that the new Google scheme to populate its local search database–Google Local Business Referral Representative Program–at the below market rate of $2-$10 per local listing closedis too good to be true, for the human capital Google seeks to exploit!
I underscored the reality, however, upon the Google announcement:Google’s $10 Local Search Pipe Dream: Slave Wages to Squeeze Yellow Pages. The Google pie-in-the-sky stab at gaining mass traction with the local merchant market for pennies on the dollar IS too good to be true, for Google.
The Google Local Business Referral Program will likely go the way of Google Answers and Google Video: An eventual unceremonious, abrupt Google about face where suppliers and users of Google for-fee services are left in the lurch.
No Google surprise, actually; Mountain View prides itself on refusing to do business the “conventional” way; i.e., the appropriate way.
After all, why should Google “conventionally” pay video content owners for the commercial exploitation of their proprietary property, when the $160 bilion market cap Googleplex can fund a free content, DMCA fueled business model via its army of legal assets.
And, why should Google “conventionally” pay local salespeople a five figure salary, commission and benefits to achieve its goal of dominating the local ad business, when the beloved Google “brand” is all it takes to lure the Google faithful to “be your own boss.”
In its FAQ for its local ad sales scheme, Google affirms a “Business Referral Representative” is NOT a Google employee. How could he or she be; The “salary” is below the legal minimum wage!
Google will NEVER pay what it takes to sustain a real, viable local ad sales force. Google, in fact, disdains real, live sales people; Just ask chief Googler Eric Schmidt.
The ever supremely confident Google CEO took the opportunity last year to extol to a media capital of the world audience of publishing and ad sales execs the virtues of Google’s automated self-serve ad system over flesh and blood sales people.
Schmidt, in his own words:
As people see targeted advertising as a way of selling they shift sales dollars, not marketing dollars, into advertising. Literally, they would put advertising dollars into Google rather than hiring a sales person.
Eventually we would hope that a targeted ad would be better than a targeted sales person; The ad can serve 24 hours a day, the ad can serve anywhere, and the ad is cheaper. The ad doesn’t require a lot of management overhead and is much more cost effective to deploy.
The investment required to fund a several thousand strong, national, professional, feet on the street local ad sales force is in contradiction with the skeletal efficiency of the automated, self-serve ad sales ethos inherent in the Google ad sales machine.
Google may have billions of cash to spare (thanks to its automated advertising system), and give away free lunches to its employees so they never leave their work at the Googleplex for food or drink, but the King of Internet advertising is not planning on realizing its mission of controlling the world’s local advertising, profitably, by schmoozing with local merchants one-on-one.
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