All Things Digital

“We feel that we have recreated the mass media.” That’s how Google’s Kim Malone Scott, in a moment of Zuckerbergian modesty, described the company’s video syndication service that will debut this fall and, shortly thereafter, transform online content distribution.

Working with Seth MacFarlane, creator of the “Family Guy” animated series, Google (GOOG) will in September begin distributing “Seth MacFarlane’s Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy,” a series of digital shorts
to be embedded on Web sites as free, ad-supported streams.
About two minutes in length, the shorts–which MacFarlane describes as “animated versions of the one-frame cartoons you might see in The New Yorker, only edgier”–will be syndicated through Google’s AdSense advertising system, which will target them at MacFarlane-friendly segments of the Web. Some will be accompanied by standard pre- or post-roll ads, some by “brought to you by” tags, and others by original commercials created by MacFarlane.

The shorts are essentially like little Assisted Ad Delivery Devices, intelligently targeting advertisements at those receptive to viewing them. “We believe the revenue could be formidable,” said Karl Austen, a lawyer who worked on the deal. “What is exciting is that this is a way to monetize the Internet immediately. Instead of creating a Web site and hoping Seth’s fans find it, we are going to push the content to where people are already at.”

Google calls its latest data portability effort Friend Connect, but a better name might have been AdWords Connect. Because, like most Google (GOOG) initiatives, that’s really what it’s all about, isn’t it? Connecting people to ads? And there’s a lot more opportunity for that when the Web itself becomes a social network. Which is exactly the sort of thing you hope for when those unobtrusive little contextual ads you sell are as ubiquitous as street signs on the Web.

Designed to help Web publishers easily add social-networking features to their sites, Friend Connect requires just a snippet of code to bring social features to a site along with a means of coordinating them with other social networks like Facebook, Plaxo and Google’s Orkut. It’s another in a recent string of data-portability efforts that hope to apply the distributed model to social networking and put an end to its so-called “walled gardens.”

“The distributed model has worked well for the Web,” David Glazer, Google director of engineering, told Outside the Lines’ Dan Farber. “That is what the Web does–many points of light loosely coupled and massively distributed, allowing users to connect to pages of information. Now it is working to connect people to other people.”

And all of them to Google AdWords, of course. More Internet usage. More ad revenue.

Maybe Google’s manifest destiny really is to control the world’s advertising–online and off.

Encouraged by the latest results of Google Print Ads, a service that allows advertisers to buy traditional newspaper space in 50 national and local papers, the company is expanding it to include 225 newspapers. Together those publications have a combined circulation of almost 30 million and serve all but three of the top 35 media markets, which could be a compelling proposition to the hundreds of thousands of Google AdWords users who are now eligible to purchase ad space in them. “We believe newspapers are a critical component in the marketing ecosystem,” Spencer Spinnell, head of sales strategy for Google Print Ads told the New York Times. “More than 50% of adults read newspapers every day, and marketers are always trying to reach new customers. It’s always a great multiplier effect when marketers think holistically both offline and online.”

Yeah. And it’s always a great multiplier effect when Google thinks holistically about newspaper advertising, which, after all, is a $48 billion-a-year business run by the same industry whose astonishing lack of foresight helped make Google into the online advertising juggernaut it is today.

Good thing Google Checkout was never intended to be a PayPal killer. Because if it was, you might think Google’s plan to host a Google Checkout party outside the eBay Live customer event in Boston tonight was something more than a funny little coincidence. You know, the same way you might think that eBay’s decision to yank all of its paid search ads from Google’s AdWords network was retaliation for that party, instead of the marketing “experiment” it so clearly was. The same way you might think Google’s unexpected cancellation of the party it had so gleefully promoted was a haphazard effort to smooth things over with the auction giant and not just the result of poor planning. Or that this entire misadventure was another sign of the significant deterioration of relations between the two Internet titans.

It was not the market-defining partnership many expected, but Google and Salesforce.com did announce an alliance yesterday. The first fruit of their collaboration: “Salesforce Group Edition featuring Google AdWords,” a joint service through which Salesforce.com will resell Google’s online-advertising tools to businesses.

During a press conference yesterday, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff (pictured below) described Salesforce Group Edition Featuring Google AdWords as a complete click-to-sale service, noting that businesses who use it will be able to generate sales leads through AdWords and then track those leads in the Salesforce application. “We have a dream to create millions of AdWords users,” said Benioff.

An interesting partnership, but not the one industry observers had predicted. Certainly, it came as a disappointment to those who’d expected the integration of other Google services like Gmail and Google Spreadsheets into Salesforce.com–although that may come in time. “This is a big product for us,” Benioff said. “We’re very fortunate to have a strong relationship with Google. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, and Google is my best friend.” At least until it becomes an enemiend, anyway …