Last June, Google CEO Eric Schmidt made some comments about his vision of the future of radio advertisements.

In Schmidt’s vision, radio ads personally address the listener about their needs. So when they pass a clothes store, they will be reminded about their need for new pants. But that sounds a little annoying.

Schmidt’s radio vision is based around GPS location-based delivery of highly targeted ads via the car radio.

Google just announced a deal with XM Satellite Radio to deliver targeted advertising to their listeners.

Google…agreement with XM Satellite Radio…to introduce and make available commercial advertising inventory on XM’s non-music channels to Google’s extensive advertising base through its dMarc media network. As part of the deal, Google advertisers will now have a simple, automated way to reach XM’s millions of subscribers nationwide and XM will have access to Google’s large and small advertisers to offer relevant, targeted messages to their subscribers.

Here is why I love the idea. First, I am all for more targeted ads designed to more intelligently separate myself from my hard earned money. Second, and I feel the most important thing here, Google has experience in making advertising very easy to get into. If you look at the level of sophistication of your average AdWords/Adsense buyer, it’s amazing how simple these marketers often are. And that speaks volumes for Google’s system. If they can bring that simplicity to radio advertisements, not only will advertisers have a better reach, but the radio industry will get a well needed resurgence in advertising. And companies like USWeb will be able to work with those advertisers to help find the right mix for them.

On a side note, it does seem odd that the first attempt at this is being made on a radio network that boasts it has little or no ads. I am anxious to see it hit local radio.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 8th, 2006 at 10:47 amand is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.