Radio Going Off The Air May 31

Google sent an email today to those involved in their Radio advertising that they will be leaving the business, much as they did (or will) with newspaper ads. The official blog post: http://google-tmads.blogspot.com/2009/02/google-exits-radio-but-will-explore.html also mentions that some of the people may lose their jobs with this change.

My personal feeling is that Google is making a big mistake. I don't have all the information about their business, but here is my take on this. They are giving up much too soon. Just as AdWords sucked in the beginning, so too did Print and Radio. TV was also off to a shaky start, but they made enough changes quickly enough that I don't see that business being dropped.

But Print and Radio were somewhat difficult to work with and hard to track performance unless you knew what you were doing. If you just ran print or radio ads and didn't have tracking in place, you wouldn't know how well they worked. I think that is what happened to many customers, and the others, like us, just found it difficult to manage. Each medium has different things to be aware of and they didn't make this easy for people.

We created some print ads and set up some campaigns, but the ads were never picked up and didn't run. We didn't get any help to understand what happened, and why they didn't work. Now we are getting an email notification once a week that our bids were not accepted, but that's for a campaign that was supposed to run in AUGUST! Why are we getting email about this now, after the campaign has expired? Sloppy and unprofessional.

Someone that recognizes these kind of problems will pick up the business and make it work, and that's ok. But I would have like to see Google make it work so all of our ad buys could have been in one place.

This may be old news to many, since I see it was posted on google-tmads.blogspot.com on 02/12/09. But for some reason, customers were just notified about this via email today, 02/17/09. Just another symptom that something is not right in Mountain View...

Google, your customers would be happy to tell you what you are doing wrong and help you do it better. But you either don't ask us, or you ask us to fill out surveys and phone interviews in return for a branded water bottle, or a "Chance" to win some drawing. Would it really kill you to offer some nice incentive, like a $50 gift card to a place where I can get something I want and don't already have 50 of, or $100 Adwords credit? [Here's a good question for you: Which incentive would cost you more? Which incentive would be more appreciated by your customers?] You are such a successful company, yet you act like you're owned by Sam Walton and you really don't value us very much at all. Or maybe it's just me...