Some real-life junk mail from Google

For some reason* it always warms my heart when Google turns to old media.

I've just got this letter in the post (click to zoom):

It's a real-life piece of snail mail, with a real-life coupon inside:

It's an unsolicited marketing message - or junk mail, if you will.

In point of fact, I've never been a Google Ad Words customer, although at one point I did take advantage of a free-trial Google Ad Words coupon inserted into Idealog, a real-life magazine.

I know the above letter is dated November 5, but snail mail can take a while to arrive. 

Especially when it comes form overseas. For although exhorting me to visit adwords.google.co.nz, it was sent from a Google office in Hong Kong. 

Perhaps word hasn't reached them that Google has a new Ad Words reseller for these parts.

For coincidentally, November 5 was also the day Yellow Pages Group become a Google AdWords Premier SME [Small to Medium Enterprise] Partner.

Keen readers will recall that early September, Yellow boss Scott Pomeroy admitted the obvious, telling NBR that "Google owns the consumer."

Mr Pomeroy stressed that "we shouldn’t be precious about Yellow owning every platform.”

And lo, Yellow is now a Google Ad Words reseller.

You could call it Yellow throwing in the towel. But in reality it's a sensible, pragmatic move.

Yellow is already New Zealand's largest purchaser of Ad Words (buying search words en masse being a good - if expensive - way to funnel people who hit Google by default through to the recently re-tooled Yellow.co.nz).

So it knows a thing or two about the tricky art of buying the right search word or phrase, in a market where pricing swings wildly (after I took up my coupon offer, I was called by a Google sales rep - based offshore - and we had a looping, confusing conversation about which words I should buy, and how many clicks I could get for my limited budget. I wanted to buy "Fletcher Building" to lure people searching for stories about that company, which was in the news at the time. The Google rep kept insisting I bid for the search words "business news." I tried and failed to explain that New Zealand was a small place, where most people already new the location of their preferred website(s) for business news).

Mr Pomeroy's thinking is that New Zealand is too small for Google to ever bother with putting many people on the ground (at one point its local office swelled to around 30; it currently it has a token local presence, with most of its Australasian operation run out of Sydney).

But confused small businesses need a helping hand with Google Ad Words, and other online services.

They want a local middle man that can guide them through the process.

And Yellow, despite its financial battering over the past few years, still has hundreds of staff who can pound the pavement and work the phones. (Google will, of course, take a big chunk of the revenue from every Ad Word sold.)

* If you have some old media/new media psychological analysis, please write it on a piece of paper, fold it twice, and leave it in the building skip behind NBR