Marissa Mayer has great insight into the possibilities 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.
Today, Mayer is the CEO of his own company, Sunshine, which builds apps that do things like share photos across groups, organize contacts, and remember friends’ birthdays. None of these apps have yet been successful, but Mayer’s background makes it worth considering his comments as they relate to online advertising.
At the Cerebral Valley AI Summit in San Francisco on Wednesday, Mayer was asked how he expects advertisers to respond as AI tools change consumers’ expectations about what information is provided and how it is presented.
Her response: Advertisers will need to provide more data than ever before to provide consumers with the most accurate and detailed answers possible.
She cited the example of concert tickets from the early days of Google searches.
“One of the classic examples we used when talking about how advertising improves search was concert tickets. When people search for concert tickets, the fact that there is an advertiser who has tickets for sale to you and is willing to pay to be included in your search results is actually a sign of quality and something that searchers are actually happy with. . They don’t want articles about concerts they want to see. They actually want to buy a ticket. So the results were good and met the expectations of both advertisers and searchers.”
In the age of AI, Mayer imagines that when people ask about tickets to a particular concert, they will actually want to know what seats are available, where they are located in the stadium, and how much they cost. They want information to be synthesized the way it would be synthesized in generative AI. So I think that means advertisers have to work more closely with Google and other search engines to make sure their products are actually showcased and aggregated with the answers.”
When interviewer Max Child asked Mayer whether companies like StubHub or Ticketmaster would be willing to provide Google with enough data to provide this level of detail, she said: “I think it’s pretty clear if you look at where search advertising was 10 years ago. I think that trend will ultimately continue because there are a lot more advertisers providing full information and different facets and aspects of data about their inventory compared to where Google Shopping is today, and certainly. .”
Mayer spoke specifically about search, but this is also an interesting hypothetical business case for pure AI providers like OpenAI and Perplexity. For example, you could imagine advertisers partnering with these companies to provide sponsored answers to certain types of queries. This is especially true if the answer actually matches what the user is looking for.
As the computing costs of AI continue to increase, AI companies will certainly be driven to find new revenue streams.
Disclosure: Yahoo is the owner of TechCrunch.
