NEW YORK -- Few Googlers understand the online advertising business as well as Susan Wojcicki.
After all, she's been a a key leader on Google's advertising products for almost a decade. Today, Wojcicki is senior vice president of advertising at Google responsible for the design and engineering of all of Google's advertising products, including AdWords, AdSense, and DoubleClick.
In a conversation with Wired's Steven Levy at the Wired Business Conference, Wojcicki touched on a number of topics, from the challenges of creating compelling display advertising to why she chose to make a commitment to stay at Google for the foreseeable future.
Wojcicki's basic message? There is more work to be done, she said, borrowing a metaphor from the literary world -- and teasing her interviewer. Asked by Levy why, with nothing in particular left to prove, she stays on the job, Wojcicki turned the tables. "Why did you write your book?" she asked Levy, a reference to newly-published In the Plex, an inside look at the place Wojcicki works.
"Google is fascinating," Wojcicki relented, "and the book isn't finished. I'm creating, living, building, and writing those chapters."
In an interview with Wired.com prior to her appearance, Wojcicki outlined a few of her goals for Google's advertising business over the next year.
"Even though search advertising works and we've had a lot of success, we think we can innovate a lot in that space," Wojcicki said. "We're always thinking about what the perfect ad is. And one of the things we're realizing is that for certain segments of advertisers, we need different kinds of experiences."
"So if you're a retail vendor and you're selling products, we want to include the pictures and the prices and be able to connect to the feed of your products," she continued. "If you're a movie company, we want to show a video in your ad, a trailer."
Wojcicki described Google's display ad business as a "very important" component of the company's overall strategy and said the company is investing heavily in that area. She said the company is also "investing heavily" in contextual and audience targeting, as part of its display ad push.
Addressing another hot topic for Google, Levy asked whether "social" is in Google's DNA, given the company's stumbles in the social space, and the ascent of Facebook, which now dominates the social networking market.
Wojcicki didn't mince words.
"People used to say that advertising wasn't in Google's DNA, and that's obviously not true anymore," Wojcicki said. "They used to say that display advertising isn't in Google's DNA, and that's not true any more."
Clearly, though, Google has yet to find a formula for social commensurate with its astonishing success in the online advertising market.
Full Coverage: Wired Business Conference: Disruptive By Design | 2011
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