(This blog is quite new, and I'm still sorta deciding what it's mission statement oughta be. So forgive me for thinking out loud here: should I be covering the Google-buys-dMarc story at all? Will that help my intended "readers" - if any show up - find and enjoy great new radio entertainment? Not really. But should I just relax and write about this interesting new-meets-old media story? 'Cause I am interested in the whole old-meets-new media thing. Hell, nobody's reading this anyway... yet. OK, here goes.)
What doesn't Google want to be? Do they want to be a big-ass media behemoth? Yep. Certainly they want to be a heavy-hitter in the radio industry, as they've just announced that they're buying a company named dMarc Broadcasting for $102 million up front. dMarc serves as an intermediary between radio stations and advertisers via their radio automation software. Google apparently wants to hook up advertisers with highly-directly local "spot-buying", using the same kind of technology and thinking that they use in their powerful "Adwords" program.
"They want to serve as an advertising aggregator where they can offer a multimedia advertising package to their customers that might otherwise go an ad agency," says Tim Ghriskey, chief investment officer of Solaris Capital, in The Street.
"Guess anyone still entertaining the notion of Google as a technology company versus a media company can put that to bed," writes Danny Sullivan on the SearchEngineWatch blog."Putting ads on radio isn't really a technology business. Nor is it central to that mission of organizing the world's information. Neither is putting ads into print or slapping them up all over the web, either."
(OK, I've decided why I wanted to write about this story. It's radio history in the making. Google is a giant mover and shaker in the media business, and quite possibly the most interesting growing-media-behemoth to watch at the moment. But will this affect your listening experience? I doubt it.)
PS - another interesting take here.
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The remarkable message
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