Marissa Mayer has a lot of insight into the promise and challenges of online advertising. She played a key role in the early days of Google Search and spent several years as CEO of Yahoo.
Mayer currently serves as CEO of his own company, Sunshine. Sunshine develops apps that help you share photos more efficiently between groups, organize your contacts, and remember your friends' birthdays. None of these apps have caught on yet, but given Mayer's background, it's worth considering her opinions as they relate to online advertising.
At the Celebrity Valley AI Summit in San Francisco on Wednesday, Mayer said he expected advertisers to respond as AI tools change consumer expectations about what information is available and how it is presented. I was asked if I was there.
Here's her answer: To provide consumers with the most accurate and detailed answers possible, advertisers will need to submit more data than ever before.
She gave the example of concert tickets from the early days of Google search.
“One of the classic examples we were talking about about how advertising improves search was concert tickets. When searching for tickets, the fact that there are advertisers selling tickets out there and are willing to pay to appear in search results is actually a sign of quality, and the fact that the searcher is actually They don't want articles about concerts they want to see. They want to actually buy tickets. So expectations are perfectly aligned on both the advertiser and searcher sides. We are doing so.”
In the age of AI, when people ask about tickets to a particular concert, “they want to know exactly which seats are actually available, where they are in the stadium, and the price,” Mayer said. I imagine. They want information to be synthesized in the same way it is synthesized in generative AI. So I think that means advertisers need to work more closely with Google and other search engines to really be able to showcase their products and synthesize answers. ”
When interviewer Max Child asked Mayer if companies like StubHub and Ticketmaster were willing to give Google enough data to provide this level of detail, she said: said. Compared to the current situation, and of course the situation with Google Shopping, there are far more advertisers providing complete information and different aspects and aspects of the data about their inventory, so I think this trend will eventually continue. I'm thinking. ”
Mayer was talking specifically about search, which is also an interesting hypothetical business case for pure AI providers like OpenAI and Perplexity. For example, we can imagine advertisers partnering with these companies to provide sponsored answers to certain types of queries, especially when those answers actually match what the user is looking for.
As AI computing costs continue to rise, AI companies will certainly look for new revenue streams.
Disclosure: Yahoo is the owner of TechCrunch.