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Marissa Mayer has a lot of thoughts about the promise and problems of online advertising. She was instrumental in the early days of Google Search and spent several years as CEO of Yahoo.
Today, Mayer is the CEO of her own company, sunrisewhich creates apps to do things like share photos between groups more efficiently, clean up your contacts, and remember your friends’ birthdays. Although none of these apps have been launched yet, Mayer’s background makes it worth considering her opinion regarding online advertising.
On Wednesday in Brain Valley AI Summit In San Francisco, Mayer was asked how she envisioned advertisers’ response as AI tools change consumers’ expectations about what information is available and how it is presented.
Her answer: Advertisers will have to hand over more data than ever before in order to give consumers the most accurate and detailed answers possible.
She cited the example of concert tickets in the early days of Google Search.
“One classic example we used to talk about how ads are optimized for search is concert tickets. When people search for concert tickets, the fact that there is an advertiser who has tickets to sell to you and is willing to pay to have them appear in your search results is actually a sign of quality.” “It’s also where the searcher is actually happy – they don’t want these articles about the concert they want to see; they actually want to buy the tickets so there’s a good fulfillment of expectations on both the advertiser and searcher side.”
In the age of artificial intelligence, Mayer imagines that when people ask about tickets to a particular concert, “they actually want to see exactly what seats are available, where they are in the stadium, and the prices. They want the information to be compiled the same way they see it being compiled.” In generative AI and so I think this means that advertisers will have to partner more closely with Google and other search engines to allow their products to be showcased and integrated with the answer.”
When interviewer Max Child asked Mayer whether companies like StubHub or Ticketmaster would be willing to provide enough data to Google to provide that level of detail, she said: “I think it’s pretty clear if you look at where search ads appear before 10 years ago compared to where they are today, and certainly where Google Shopping is, there are a lot of advertisers that are providing complete information on their inventory and a lot of different facets and aspects of the data, so I think that trend will eventually continue.”
Although Mayer was talking about the research specifically, it also represents an interesting hypothetical business case for pure AI providers like OpenAI and Perplexity. It is possible to imagine, for example, that advertisers collaborate with these companies to provide sponsored answers to specific types of queries, especially when the answers actually match what the user is searching for.
As the computing costs of AI continue to rise, AI companies will certainly be forced to look for new sources of revenue.
Disclosure: Yahoo is the owner of TechCrunch.
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