Marissa Mayer has a lot of insights into the promise and problems with online advertising. She played an instrumental role in the early days of Google Search and spent several years as Yahoo’s CEO.
Today, Mayer is the CEO of her own company, Sunshine, which is creating apps to do things like share photos among groups more efficiently, clean up your contacts, and remember your friends’ birthdays. While none of these apps has taken off yet, Mayer’s background makes it worth considering her opinion as it relates to online advertising.
On Wednesday at the Cerebral Valley AI Summit in San Francisco, Mayer was asked how she envisions advertisers responding as AI tools change expectations from consumers about what information is available and how it’s presented.
Her answer: Advertisers will be compelled to turn over more data than ever before in order to give consumers the most precise and detailed answers possible.
She cited the example of concert tickets in the early days of Google Search.
“One of the classic examples we used to talk about how ads make search better was concert tickets. When people search for concert tickets, the fact that there’s an advertiser there that has tickets to sell you and they’re willing to pay to be in your search results is actually a sign of quality, and it’s also where the searcher actually is happy — they don’t want these articles about the concert they want to see; they actually want tickets to purchase. And so there’s a nice meeting of expectations on both the advertiser and searcher side.”
In the AI era, Mayer imagines that when people ask about tickets for a specific concert, “they actually want to see exactly what seats are available, where they are in the stadium, the pricing. They want that information synthesized in much the way they see it synthesized in generative AI. And so I think it means that advertisers are going to have to partner even more closely with Google and other search engines to allow their wares to really be showcased and synthesized with the answer.”
When interviewer Max Child asked Mayer if companies like StubHub or Ticketmaster would be willing to give over enough data to Google to provide this level of detail, she noted, “I think that it’s pretty clear if you look at where search ads were 10 years ago versus where they are today, and certainly where Google Shopping is, there are a lot more advertisers that are giving full information of their inventory and a lot of different aspects and facets of the data, and so I think that trend is ultimately going to continue.”
Although Mayer was talking about search specifically, it’s also an interesting hypothetical business case for pure-play AI providers like OpenAI and Perplexity. It’s possible to imagine, for example, advertisers partnering with these companies to give sponsored answers to specific types of queries, especially where the answers actually match up with what the user is looking for.
As the compute costs for AI continue to rise, AI companies will certainly be driven to seek out new sources of revenue.
Disclosure: Yahoo is the owner of TechCrunch.
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