March 20, 2023
Marketplace recently published an interview featuring Garrett Johnson, Assistant Professor of Marketing, discussing the future challenges advertisers will face by the next generation of search engines.
Nearly every service used on the internet is a platform for advertising, specifically search engines. Advertisers will pay to get their sites at the top of search results, have their businesses show up on digital maps, or populate their products at the top of shopping carousel pages and so on. However, advertisers are now challenged and left to adapt to the next generation of search engines as chat-based artificial intelligence permeates web searches. Johnson predicts advertisers must be mindful of brand safety. AI chatbots have developed into hateful messages – today they have more guardrails to limit this, however imperfect.
Advertisers will need to leap in with both feet for competitive reasons. Johnson elaborates on this by stating that, “I think these chat-based searches are going to be a bit of learning in real time, and the search engines don’t want to be left behind and so they’re going to try to release these products into the market. For advertisers, they need to maintain the relevancy and stave off a potential land grab here by search engines.”
