The Google Phone, or: Not all big markets are good markets.

The Church of the customer blog recently posted this article commenting on the rumored Google phone.  Their opinion of the targeted marketing to the cell phone angle is pretty dead-on with mine:  ads on my cell phone popping up in context to what I’m doing sounds like the pits of hell.  What it says to me is that if I have this phone, people will be watching what I’m doing and actively be trying to distract me from it with messages to get me to spend more money on items peripherally related to where I am and what I appear to be doing at all times.  Did anyone else not see Minority Report?  Did not the part where ads were appearing in the air in front of Tom Cruise as he walked through the place not make your skin crawl?  Note to google:  the movie folks put that scene in to make the future world they were discribing creepier, not better.

Still, I do believe that there is definitely a big market for this device, for the following reasons:

• People trust Google.  Techies love google.  Lots will try it just because of the google brand involved.
• People like free.  Lots of folks will be willing to read and click through the ads to earn minutes.
• There are folks out there who need free.  I can see, for example, younger teens clicking through ads wildly to earn minutes so that they can call their friends.

However, let’s consider this:

• In many cases, people who click through the ads will be doing it to earn minutes, not to check out new products.  Their focus won’t be on your ads, so how much good will your ads really do?
• In many cases, people who click through ads will be people who can’t afford to buy minutes.  Don’t you want to market to people who can afford your products?
• I know many people (I’m one of them) who pay for premium tv channels for no other reason than they don’t want to watch commercials.  Won’t the most affluent buyers likely be willing to pay extra to not see commercials/ads?
• Research has already shown here that cellphone text ads are the least trusted advertising method out there.

To me, this says that the google phone is an idea that can gain a lot of adoption with users, but as an advertiser, I’m just not sure how much sense it makes to me.  Targeted ads have some appeal to me, granted.  If I’m in a strange place and need to find a restaurant, targeted ads can help me.  Then again, so can simply hitting google maps from my existing internet-enabled phone.  As an advertiser, I just don’t know how much good the google phone does me.

There is one key to this still open, and that is functionality.  What will the google phone do besides deliver ads?  How cool will it be?  Google has a history of innovating.  People expect the phone to be cool.  If it is, and that drives adoption of the device as a trusted source of information and productivity, people will tend to trust the device for other things too.  Now suddenly my ads on google phone mean a lot more.

So what’s going to happen with google phone?  We’ll have to wait and see.

There’s a lesson to be learned for your own projects and products here, though.  You have to remember all of your user classes.  Yes, the google phone can likely show a huge userbase for promoting ads.  Google will get paid by the advertisers though, not the users.  As an advertiser, there’s some debate as to how great the google phone will be.  There’s plenty to hype about, but an analytical look makes it less certain.  Big adoption is no good to your project (and in fact can be a detriment) if you are not gaining revenue from the people that adopt your idea.  Paying customers are key.  What value are you bringing to them?  Are you taking care of the revenue stream?

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