Google Experiments With Utterly Old School Video Ads

Google is experimenting with ads in some Google Video clips (via Inside Google via Boing Boing) — a stunning failure of innovation, here is was an example of an Allstate ad embedded into a Charlie Rose clip, which is was as interruptive, untargeted and utterly old school as anything mass TV advertising has ever inflicted on viewers. Charlie gets interrupted mid-sentence when the video hits the blue box.

PRE-POST UPDATE: Just as I was about to post this, I noticed that the ads had been removed from the clip.

Fortunately, I got a screen shot of the ad:


Nathan Weinberg has a screen shot of the blue boxes that marked where the ads used to be.

It’s no surprise at all that Google removed the ads as this story was breaking. Here’s where all the innovation that made Google the monster it is today goes out the window — with video, there’s no text-based user intentions delivered on a silver platter, no easily read text-based context. Sure, text can be associated with video, but as of this moment, video ads are completely lacking the elegance and innovation of AdWords.

I can only assume that this is just a test and that Google has a lot more up their sleeve — they better, because this is what will drive the next round of online advertising wealth creation. Google may have competition-crushing scale, but they have yet to corner the market on innovation for online video ads.

The game is afoot.