What If Google Never Succeeds With Offline Advertising?

Discussions of Google’s offline media ambitions — to extend their wildly successful platform for online advertising to offline advertising — typically assume that Google’s success in the offline arena is just a matter of time. But the reality is that Google has nothing but a string of failures to show for itself, most notably in print, but apparently radio isn’t going so well either (via MediaPost):

CHAD AND RYAN STEELBERG, THE founders of an automated radio ad placement company purchased by Google in January 2006, have left the company.

The brothers resigned amid reports of growing tension between dMarc, the company they founded, and Google over differing approaches to radio ad sales. There was also said to be tension over the limited remuneration dMarc could expect under the performance-based terms of its original deal with Google.

The MediaPost article makes reference to “sluggish revenue” for Google’s radio ad program and a Valleywag report that only $200 million out of a potential $1.3 billion performance incentive from the dMarc acquisition deal will likely be earned by management and investors.

Could it be that Google’s high efficiency advertising engine is only succeeding in exposing the gross inefficiencies of traditional offline advertising to Google’s huge stable of ROI hungry online advertisers?

Can Google continue its torrid pace of growth if offline advertising turns out to be a brick wall?