One question on blogger’s minds today in wake of the news that Google has dropped $102 million to acquire dMarc broadcasting, a somewhat small player in terrestrial radio management, is metrics. Of course this is true of any audio advertising, including podcasting with its more computerized roots: how do you know what business was generated from the radio advertising campaign? Branding seems to be the keyword that is thrown around in radio advertising discussions, but reliable metrics is what advertisers are most intested in.

In the future, Google plans to integrate dMarc technology into the Google AdWords platform, creating a new radio ad distribution channel for Google advertisers.

I can see the fit for Google to offer Adsense and Adwords audio advertising opportunities, but with current technology it’s not that easy to measure campaigns unless listeners are encouraged to sign up with special codes, telephone numbers or something that would only come from hearing the ads on the radio. The fallback is listening audience size which if you are Howard Stern makes or Johnny Smith on the late Sunday evening show in North Dakota varies wildly. Then there are specialized shows like Bob Brinker’s MoneyTalk or Cramer’s Mad Money show, booyah! or the sports ones like Jim Rome but then it seems like a lot of those shows have their own advertising setups. Will Google be able to cut some deal with Clear Channel, the big boy on the radio block?

For $102 million I’m not completely sure what Google bought here. Is dMarc worth $102 million? This isn’t a huge amount to Google these days but with the incentive-laden deal could end up costing as much as $1 billion. This paper trail finanical deal could be a problem if they don’t spin something truly revolutionary with audio and advertising. Hopefully this deal is something like requiring a MLB slugger to hit X amount of homeruns before cashing in on the bigger payday.

I won’t count out Google on the cool technology front so here’s my wish list: how about something that integrates with audio on the computer and flips URLs on request when the show is talking about something? Something like what WMP does or what was recently announced by Microsoft with their hyperlink video ads.

At the end of the day, somewhere in this deal, hopefull will emerge a worthwhile technology tie-in and from everything I’ve read today so far about this, nothing groundbreaking was announced. Just buying up a small player in what some folks think (not me) is a dying medium — terrestrial radio — doesn’t sound very promising or exciting.

Apparently not very exciting to shareholders today either as GOOGle stock today barely fluctuated (see graph above). This is the first time Google has done something in awhile where the stock price hasn’t had a noticeable flucuation.

Anybody else super excited by this move? Seeing something here that I’m not? I’ll keep reading what others have to say and maybe something will click.

Where is the cool technology in this Google? Is that coming? All we hear is … Radio Ga Ga.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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