How online maps will change advertising

I personally find online mapping to be one of the greatest uses of the internet so far. Applications that let you find directions easily have now exploded in to significant platforms, and they offer a plethora of remarkable options have huge implications for advertising going forward. In this article, I’ll discuss the two big mapping applications that I tend to use — but you should remember that both of these mapping applications are also platforms.

The reason this distinction matters is that any developer can write against these platforms to create their own applications. We’ve seen some early mashups of web applications that allow developers to overlay cool and useful information on top of Google and Bing maps. But those early applications are going to be overcome quickly by newer, more powerful applications that will be incredibly useful for marketing businesses.

The first thing you should do is go see the latest version of both the Bing and Google mapping applications. For Bing, I recommend you give the beta product a spin — but it does require that you install the latest version of Microsoft’s Silverlight. I promise that it’s worth the install; the mapping application makes use of some special features within Silverlight to do really cool stuff.

For full disclosure, I work at Microsoft — and I sit in the same building with the Bing team. But I promise, this article will be fair. And while I’ll call out some of the new functionalities in both products, for the most part, Google has the superior mapping application. Frankly, in many areas, the Google Maps product kicks the crud out of Bing Maps. But I will say that Bing Maps is one of the areas of Microsoft that includes some of the greatest and fastest innovation, so keep checking in on it.

Street-side views
Both Bing Maps and Google Maps offer a street-side view feature that is quite incredible, and both have big implications for local businesses and local retail branches of national chains. These street-side views let the user virtually move through streets surrounded by high-quality images.

Google’s image quality is notably better than Bing’s beta product, and Google has much more comprehensive coverage of the U.S. But one thing I love about Bing’s Streetside is that it’s an actual 3-D model of the environment, with images mapped to the surface of the 3-D world. While this technical innovation might not seem important, it matters a lot when inserting other data objects into the environment.

I’ve taken the liberty of grabbing a few links for you to play with — one for the beta Bing Maps Streetside View and one for Google Street View. So go play with both for a few minutes, then come back and read more:

• Bing Streetside View — Greenwich Village, New York, N.Y.
• Google Street View — East Village, facing Washington Square Park, New York, N.Y.

One cool innovation Google has put into Google Maps is the ability to have user-uploaded photos show up in linked geographic locations. This means that when users upload photos in Picasa and map their locations in the real world, a huge number of real-world photos can become available for given locations. For example, if you move forward to the Triumphal Arch in the Google Maps link above, in the upper right corner of the application, you will be able to click to bring Picasa users’ photos of the arch right into the application.

Bing has done some other interesting things with map overlays — which are especially enhanced due to the 3-D nature of the mapping environment — in which you can see Twitter tweets laid right into the spot where the “tweeters” were standing when they posted. Take a look at that here in Bing Twitter Viewwithin Streetside. The tweets are updated every few minutes, so you’ll likely see different ones than I did. But for the most part, folks are tweeting quite a lot about restaurants they’re eating at, stores they’re on their way to, etc.

Similarly, with Bing’s overlays of businesses, you can get a real sense of the neighborhood you’re going to visit, or where you’re meeting someone. I used this feature myself last week when I was meeting someone at a restaurant I hadn’t been to — and I was even able to figure out where to park in advance.

And while these street level views are both amazing and useful, both Google Maps and Bing Maps have done an amazing job of getting local businesses mapped, as you can see in the below images.

Bing Maps:

Google Maps:

Where Google’s maps really stand out is the incorporation of deep refinements for public transportation and walking directions — which are incredibly valuable for any of these big cities. But both applications also provide platform access (application programming interfaces, or APIs) that let developers enhance and build functionality on top of their platforms. So even if the developers at Google or Microsoft don’t quite get everything the world needs built out, as web users, we at least have the opportunity to experience even more rich and fruitful experiences.

So, if companies need special applications, such as real-estate listings or store locations, they have the ability to make use of and specifically enhance the mapping for their own use. This is important because, in a world where we are increasingly wired together through a host of connected internet-enabled experiences, businesses need to keep up. As professionals in this industry, we need to figure out what the implications of these mapping applications are for advertising and marketing — across all interactive media types, from web to mobile.

Eric Picard is the advertising technology advisor to the Advertising Platform Engineering team at Microsoft.

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