GOOGLE'S RECENT FORAY INTO PRINT advertising fell short of the company's expectations, a company executive said Wednesday. Speaking on a conference call with investors and the media, Jonathan Rosenberg, Google's senior vice president for product management, said the venture to auction off print ads in magazines, which launched in February, has been one of the biggest disappointments in the last six months.
"That probably hasn't taken off as fast as we would like," said Rosenberg of the initiative, which involved selling small horizontal, banner-like ad units in 26 magazines, including Ellegirl, Motor Trend, and PC World. Rosenberg said that Google in the future would work on "integrating the ads in the medium better."
Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that despite the initial experience with print ads, the company intends to expand into other media. "We've talked about the expansion into video and video ads, and eventually into television," he said. "My guess is for each of these new major media initiatives, we'll have a few cycles of trying to find the right combination of advertiser product, targeting product, and business model that really takes off."
Also during the conference call, Schmidt said that Google would be keeping a close eye on MSN search integration in the upcoming Windows Vista product. The search giant has expressed concerns to the U.S. Department of Justice that if MSN Search is the default search engine for Vista users, Microsoft could gain an unfair advantage in competition with other search engines. "Vista is scheduled to ship in '07, and we'll see how it comes out. There's a lot of opportunity for Microsoft to change what they're doing based on customer feedback and other factors," he said. "We want to make sure that that use of the power of Windows is done in a correct and legally appropriate way."
