Google to sell advertising in Maps Street View

Google’s patent http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PG01&s1=20100004995.PGNR.&OS=DN/20100004995&RS=DN/20100004995 “Claiming Real Estate in Panoramic or 3D Mapping Environments for Advertising” which has been granted on January the 7th, 2010 has the following abstract:




Techniques for identifying groups of features in an online geographic view of a real property and replacing and/or augmenting the groups of features with advertisement information are described. The techniques include providing a geographic view of a property within an online property management system, identifying a region of interest in the geographic view, analyzing the geographic view to locate one or more promotional features within the geographic view positioned upon a real property region, providing a user-selectable link associated with the region of interest in the geographic view, receiving a request for the region of interest in the geographic view via the user-selectable link, receiving data to alter at least one of the behavior or the appearance of the region of interest, storing the data in association with the geographic view, and updating the region of interest within the geographic view based upon the received data.

This technology will make it possible to identify billboards, posters and buildings on its mapping services like Street View to replace old advertising on those objects with new adverts.

Furthermore, the patent refers to auctioning advertising spaces based on contextually relevant matches. Would Google permit competitors to bid on competitive real-estate and advertise there?



This technology certainly sounds interesting, augmenting static content with dynamic advertising. Depending on the integration of such advertising in Street View it might perfectly blend in and be an organic experience with content which might actually be useful for the user, being it up to date.

Think of the many opportunities, cinemas can refresh their billboard on Street View real-time and showing what movie is being shown at that point of time or that evening.



This does remind me of in-game advertising, making use of billboards, posters and so on in games and offering advertising opportunities in surroundings and experiences which users do not find artificial or disturbing.