Danger for Companies Advertising on Sites like Google

Danger for Companies Advertising on Sites like Google Internet Advertising is Not Anything like Old Fashioned Newspaper Print Advertising. it Maybe More Powerful but Could Prove to Be a Dangerous Sword Without a Handle Lex Loeb Contributor Network . Google executives might just see the rest of us who use their online sites as virtual ants in a virtual ant colony that they ruthlessly control. It brings to mind one of those Plexiglas ant farms of childhood play where the giants and watching the captive ants live their lives between to clear plastic panels. Anyone entering such an ant farm on the ant farmer's terms is going to be subject to what ever whims the ant farmer may have in mind for the ants. Not only can the ant farm be shut down it can also be tossed in the trash --ants and all. Internet companies like Google are collecting and mining data online from users around the world and pin pointing search and web history on their servers on a complex version of google earth where the company is party to seeing the end use of data requests as patterns that can be seen on the physical global map. Not only can they use the data to see the address of every computer connected to their server on google maps they can map the popular interest around the globe in searching for any specific subject such that they might see Great Britain more lit up with dot with concerns about searching about the Royal Wedding than say dots on the map of Africa or Central America where the map has a more sparse number of dots lighting up the map. Advertisers will get really excited by being able to see these kinds of maps generated from their advertising campaigns if they are lucky and Google is sharing this data. Where are their dots lighting up on the Google earth map of Internet terminals and now lap tops and cell phones around the planet? Advertising companies beware Google is not necessarily sharing all of the information they are gathering as the result of your online campaigns with you and this kind of information can actually be generated at your expense as a company and later used against you and your business interests. Your company maybe getting the best top of mind awareness ever with Google Style advertising but later once you are no longer a customer or maybe even if you still are Google can back mine the data and sell it to a competitor or share it with an upstate that might be allied with or as one of their subsidiaries. It used to be when you had a print advertising campaign for your company you would collect all of your own feed back from any one calling your business as a result of placing your ad. There was no intermediary collecting data on how your ad might be lighting up the world map. Not even the phone companies were doing very much plotting all the dots on a global map nor using advanced forms of analysis to see just how your business could be instantly improved with competitive advantages of reaching your critical dynamic customer base. You could be a company the size of Coke Cola and using online advertising sites like My Coke Rewards and think that you have all the information about your customers from what information feed back you get from your own webmasters but remain completely in the dark about what a company like Google can glean from ad placements you have on their search networks. Google could find the key characteristics of the the best customers you have and their on and off line behavior, locations and have no legal obligation to share it with you. When google goes into business taking ownership of a travel reservations website beware they could have an immense advantage over the other online travel reservations sites including the biggest ones because have target data from those other companies having spent large sums of money on advertising campaigns with Google. Google may know that it can steer 70 percent of all traffic to it's own site by exploiting the secrets they have learned from mining your advertising campaign data. This could eventually become an anti trust issue once it becomes visible to companies that they are at a disadvantage to the gate keepers of successful online advertising. Goolge might also not have to pay for their own advertising at the same rate they charge out of house operations. Goolge can then essentially not only advertise it's own competitive service for free but have all the advantages that the advertisers who paid for services in the past don't have from their own data signature records of campaigns over the online networks. Google is not the only company with that kind of advantage. Facebook is yet another example of a company that is learning how to make virtually anything go viral. Imagine if they could make something advertised go viral that would never ever go viral otherwise? It could go way beyond any propaganda tool known to civilization in ancient or modern times. After reading that the CIA , State department and other US agencies may be paying for online services like google , facebook and twitter to destabilize non democratic governments around the world maybe we should also be worried that they might have the same thing in mind for us eventually. A number of Americans already feel they were manipulated online and with print and television media into thinking that Obama was somehow something historically refreshing when he really was not. People can learn not to be violated by a viral campaign intended to control their immediate future destiny. The rise of the Tea Party movement showed an amazing ability to turn the tables online and to re-control destiny. Is there really an online Google advertising conspiracy? Probably yes but we might not be completely aware of it until we see Internet dominated companies completely out growing the rest of the economy with dissimilar access to the Internet. Already one has the sense that one's business has to be allied with one or more vitual online key player. One's business might have to be allied in the future with an Ebay or Amazon or Yahoo or Google just to be able to survive. That may seem strange to some but not to those who know that print and tv media ads had been an absolute requirement for companies in the past to have to deal with monopoly newspapers and television networks that operated as gate keepers and were well compensated by necessity. This is why one might see Yahoo down at the bottom of the list of Internet high flyer's after the proposed merger between Microsoft and Google fell apart when one really should see Yahoo a necessary tool and counteractive potential monopoly to fend off Google from other territories. That would suggest the market price of Yahoo is now quite under by the Market and that eventually some other company like Microsoft might be forced eventually to have to pay though the nose to buy it for a multiple of billions more than they last offered. I had friends who established an early Internet web business and they said it was like taking candy from their customers as babies and that is just exactly the attitude of the high and might Internet companies like Google. Business advertising on Google , especially the ones with large expensive long term campaigns should demand immediate and ongoing access to all behind the scenes data mining. Then comes the next problem for the rest of us ants in their virtual ant farm-the data mining that goes on passes from Google to Any company advertising and we become privacy issue data mined victims with no compensation. As congress considers regulating Internet privacy it becomes very clear that the congressmen are just more babies for the Internet monster companies to take candy from. Politicians really don't understand all of what is going on or how things work on the new online networks and they don't yet even realize that companies like Google can do the same thing to them they can do to advertisers in a manner that will change the outcome of elections. This is because the issue is not really necessarily what is traditionally called "privacy" because all of the names and identifiers can just be coded to protect privacy with the same level or degree of potential manipulation or access to key data that does not have to be grounded in personal privacy. We are talking about lit up dots on a Google earth map and what makes them light up , how , where , when , when and why. Is it possible for companies just to go back to print advertising? NO it is antiquated but advertisers need to demand the back room data files and monitoring before and after paying for a campaign and for protections against competitors getting their fossil data patterns. There might need to be a law that analysis of such data is not allowed with out company permission? Who owns one advertising data trail information? Right now it seems clear that companies like Google probably do. Larger companies need to demand protections before paying for future and ongoing campaigns and should demand some kind of direct access before the whole country and world becomes one big online company store. Some day it will be the big news story that some small upstart company in bed with a company like Google or owned outright by Google sends one of the biggest companies in the world in the same business into bankruptcy and then we see a string of those happening one by one just because the business can be diverted away from back mining their own advertising campaigns. .