Google Search Ads - Misdirected Advertising, evolutionary dead end?

...my basic premise rejects this, suggesting that simple commercial messages, pushed through whatever medium, in order to reach a potential customer who is in the middle of doing something else, will fail. It’s not that we no longer need information to initiate or to complete a transaction; rather, we will no longer need advertising to obtain that information. We will see the information we want, when we want it, from sources that we trust more than paid advertising. We will find out what we need to know, when we want to make a commercial transaction of any kind. The conventional wisdom is that this is exactly what paid search helps us to do, but all too often they are nothing more than a form of misdirection, as I explain further below. Instead, we will use information that we trust, obtained at the time that we want to see it.

Misdirection, or sending customers to web locations other than the ones for which they are searching. This is Google’s business model. Monetization of misdirection frequently takes the form of charging companies for keywords and threatening to divert their customers to a competitor if they fail to pay adequately for keywords that the customer is likely to use in searches for the companies’ products; that is, misdirection works best when it is threatened rather than actually imposed, and when companies actually do pay the fees demanded for their keywords. Misdirection most frequently takes the form of diverting customers to companies that they do not wish to find, simply because the customer’s preferred company underbid. Misdirection also includes misinformation, such as telling a customer that a hotel is sold out when, indeed it is still available, if the hotel has chosen not to pay a promotional fee, and then allowing the guest to choose an alternative property. Misdirection is, regrettably, still a popular business model on the net, although for reasons I explored in an earlier TechCrunch post on Google it seems ultimately to be unsustainable. More significantly from the perspective of this post, it is not scalable; it is not possible for every website to earn its revenue from sponsored search and ultimately at least some of them will need to find an alternative revenue model.

- Selling Virtual Things: People will pay for superior, timely, original content and for superior online experiences.

- Selling Access. Misdirection will fail totally and completely. I use a Mac, but I have abandoned Safari for Firefox.

- Sponsorship - as in "This Impartial, Trusted site is brought to you by ACME Co.

- Back End Analytics - you don't see Ads, your attention is monetised by analysing your actions (think Google, Phorm, etc). In theory this will lead to Ads so useful that you will think they are information - I think the short term $$$ from dataphishing will seduce the players though.

- Display 2.0 - better metrics around the impact and brand building capability of Display Ads - our hypothesis is that they are still more effective than believed online, its just that the metrics are very poor today.