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I spotted this flash advert for Google Local UK on Bebo, a popular social networking site. Advertising their services with animated flash ads seems like a very strange move for Google, who have previously derided the use of such advertising on other networks. Bebo use a rotating 300×250 ad on their main page, which alternates between adsense text and junk flash, such as smilies and screensavers. Therefore, this ad came as a surprise:

There are a whole series of these ads appearing at random times throughout the bebo site (screenshot left), both in this rectangular format and as skyscrapers. The style is the same in each, with a different topic and city in each one (ie. Flowers in London, Pizza in Glasgow). Since the ads are geo-targetted to the UK, I have packaged ten of them together for you to download should you wish to:

So why is this a big deal? Well, the thing about Google is that they revolutionised online advertising with their targetted text ads. Before adwords, banner ads across the whole internet were being increasing derided as unsuccessful, as users were a) irked by them, b) didn’t click them often enough, and c) were blocking them. In Adsense, google found a way of advertising in a very relevent and unobtrusive way: the text links matched the content of the page well enough that many regular users couldn’t even tell that they were ads, and power users appreciated the subtle approach. Google bragged about their lean interface and talked down the other search engines and networks for the barrage of spam they subjected their users to.
As recently as 2004, Craig Silverstein, Google’s director of technology, commented on this philosophy:
“The focus that Google has on our users, you know, a very slim homepage and so forth – text ads, not banner . . . We do that because we don’t want to go to sites with banner ads. We don’t like them.�?

Interestingly, it was only two months after he made this statement that Google started running banner images on the third party adsense sites. In a quick change of heart, Google had decided that while it didn’t want the image ads ruining it’s own site, it didn’t mind profiting from filling other sites with banners. Since that time, Google has embarked on what could be seen as a creeping campaign to justify it’s share price and generate more revenue at the expense of it’s users. The AOL deal, in which Google purchased a chunk of the giant network, was one giant billion-dollar backhander, and the terms of it read like a pyramid scheme. As well as the general adsense price-fixing the deal opened up for Google, it is widely speculated that the two companies will combine on Google video to turn it into a TV-style ad supported delivery service.

Of course, there is a flip side to everything, and in this case I do think it’s important to consider that as flash ads go, these Google ones aren’t all that bad. To a user who hadn’t seen Google local before, this ad would be very compelling, and is vastly more useful than the usual spam ads that fill these type of sites. Similarly, the ads for the Davinci code on the Google site are under the clever guise of a competition, keeping the tech fraternity happy with Sodoku-esque puzzles so that they don’t complain about pages full of flash.

It remains to be seen what will come of Googles rapidly expanding list of purchases and me-too betas, but paired with their elastic corporate philosophy, they risk damaging their reputation at it’s core.

The ads are also appearing in rotation on the PC Zone site (screenshot left) and several others, and are being served by Tangozebra.