Saul Hansell of the New York Times is reporting that Google has begun testing video ads on their search pages.

“The big insight of Google wasn’t text ads; it was that the ads should be conducive to the format. We were doing text-based search that was all textual. Visual ads don’t work in that format,” Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search products and user experience told Saul in their interview.

“We don’t want all sorts of video and banner ads all over the site all the time,” Ms. Mayer said. “People who advertise a movie want to show a trailer. Why shouldn’t they have the same format we use for search results and have a little plus box that says watch the trailer?”

Google will be slowly introducing video ads with a small “plus sign” icon next to search results that contain video, according to Hansell’s Bits Blog. Google has been testing multiple ways to leverage video, including YouTube’s overlay graphical ads. Video units were introduced to AdSense in October. Rest assured, this won’t be the last video development for AdSense.

Tags: adsense, google, new york times, video ads

This entry was posted on Friday, February 15th, 2008 at 11:53 am and is filed under News, Real Ads, Video Search, advertising, blogs, technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.