How advertising works

Well, what a cracking week. The internet has been going crazy over this blog posting from a Google employee, offering to sell pharmaceutical companies ad space opposite Google searches for Sicko, a Michael Moore film taking aim at America's healthcare system. Cory Doctorow's take on the original posting at BoingBoing (see the full list of posts so far here) is fairly typical of the response the the post has generated.

To paraphrase the whole scandal, it appears that Lauren Turner, the Google employee in question, suggested publicly that Sicko portrayed health insurers and pharma companies in the US of being marketing- and advertising-driven organisations rather than companies dedicated to making people healthy. She then suggested that the aforementioned organisations buy advertising to market their way out of the problem.

Nat Torkington at O'Reilly has a great write up (thanks to BoingBoing for pointing to this one as well, by the way). I'm going to wade in as well (with considerably less authority, of course).

Some might call this creative selling - after all, Google does have
money to make, and Adwords and other products are a key method of
doing this. Others might say that this was, in some way, naughty.
Lauren published a business jargon-heavy retraction, and Google's corporate blog has also waded in.

Frankly, all this does is confirm that Google is just like any other
company - with one caveat that I'll get into later. Let's have a bit of
reality here. People might like to believe that Google is some new,
shiny beast, that Web 2.0 is going to change things where .com didn't.
I sincerely hope al of this will change established economic and
business rules, but I rather fear that it won't. Look at the agonising
corporate-speak in the retractions, for example. The fact that Google
is using these tactics - which are pretty accepted - to make sales.
There's nothing new here. Move along, but please, don't be
surprised.

I mentioned a caveat, and this is it; all of this was done in public.
What might, in the past, have been a Glengarry - Glenross steak knives
phonecall from the Smile 'n Dial department is now open to view to
everyone. That, at least, is the good news. That's what we should be
getting exercised about.