How Google Will Help to Proliferate Rich Display Ads

While rich media displays comprise just 6 percent of Web advertising now, that number will vastly increase as the cost and complexity of serving comes down quickly, says Barry Salzman, Google's Managing Director of Media and Platforms, the Americas. In this video interview with Beet.TV, Salzman says that rich media, including video display advertising will appear on "hundreds of thousands of sites" and will create a $50 billion marketing by 2015.

How Google Will Help to Proliferate Rich Display Ads Male1: Well I think two things are going on with the business. Firstly we have had unprecedented rates of technology innovation governed in large part by much faster internet speeds which is allowing us to use things like video which we just could not do until very recently. The other is that we are starting to see this fundamental shift in how consumers are engaging with media and spending a lot more of their time away from traditional television and as a result of that we have not only the technology that makes it possible but we are also starting to see real advertiser demand. And so we think that when we talk about the golden age of display a lot of that is because display advertising online is becoming either a compelling supplement or in some cases a compelling substitute to television advertising and I think that will be the real driver of the growth and when we talk about a fifty billion dollar industry by 2015. A lot of that will come from transitioning television dollars to online display. Right now despite the fact that Rich Media outperforms any kind of static media online by multiples, we still see relatively little Rich Media and the number we have used were six percent of ads over the last year. The reason for that, the primary reason for that is that it is incredibly difficult to deliver or serve Rich Media ads onto websites so we have advertisers spend an awful lot of money developing these concepts and developing the creative and running it on one or two large websites. What Google has really focused on is trying to bring down the cost and complexity of display advertising so that it becomes easier and cheaper for advertisers to serve these Rich Media ads across hundreds of thousands of websites and we think it is really being able to work on that back end to make the back end simpler by leveraging technology that will be the catalyst that allows Rich Media ads to become prolific across the Internet. Male2: Now let us talk about video as display ads and of course there a lot of that, we see a lot for trailers for movies, how might that develop? Male1: You know I think in a lot of ways it is the same principles that made television an engaging medium so the first thing about video is that it allows advertisers to start to create an emotional bond with their consumer just like they do on television and it is because video bring with it full sight, sound and motion. So I think as an industry we always knew that video as a medium was a highly compelling way for advertisers to get their message across but with slow access speeds that we had until relatively recently video was limited online and in fact I just read a statistic recently which said that within ten years, we will be connecting to the Internet at speeds 500 times faster than today, 500 times faster in the United States than what we do today. And an environment like that I would imagine that every kind of ad format becomes a video format. So think for a minute about that mobile device in your pocket, right it is not just a phone in fact as many of you know it is a super powerful computer and we think of it as having…