Originally Published: April 2004
The popular search engine Google is testing the waters of free, web-based email by offering a service currently branded under the name Gmail (although Google is currently engaged in a legal battle over the name). Free email services have been around for years, but they consistently have the disadvantage of small storage limits. But, Gmail has eliminated the problem by offering an unprecedented one gigabyte storage limit per user – an estimated 500,000 pages of email. This is a colossal amount of space considering other free, web-based email services like Hotmail and Yahoo! offer far less – providing only two and four megabytes of storage, respectively, before having to pay fees. Google brags that a Gmail user may never have to delete an email message again. But, Gmail does not only offer the advantage of massive storage space, it features extensive filing and search functions and the opportunity to precisely target users for marketing purposes. But along with the positives, there are also significant drawbacks to Gmail’s service, including the inability to permanently delete email messages even if a user closes his or her account and privacy issues surrounding Google’s proposed automated email scanning system and the corresponding targeted marketing messages that the system delivers to users.
Gmail has perfected the art of allowing users to file and search email messages. No longer will users sort emails; instead, they will search them. Gmail allows users to search for specific email or mail containing specific keywords. The system allows users to categorize messages with one or multiple labels and to add keywords to messages. These labels and keywords code the messages and become search keys. As such, searching allows users to find emails relating to specific labels and keywords very quickly, saving the time wasted on manually sorting through hundreds of emails.
Gmail promises to deliver an added benefit to marketers – an automated scanning system that will grab keywords from each email and deliver targeted marketing messages to the user – known as contextual advertising. For example, a user sends an email to a friend about his recent trip to Hawaii. When the recipient opens and reads the email detailing his friend’s travels and the wonderful time he spent on the islands, Gmail will have scanned the message and delivered a related advertisement to the recipient. In this example, the recipient may receive an advertisement for a Delta Airlines ticket sale to the Cayman Islands. All advertisements will appear on the screen as small, unobtrusive ads like Google’s search page “Sponsored Links”. Viewed by some as a minor inconvenience, these ads could become a huge moneymaker for Google with advertisers clamoring to get their message in the face of users who have a related interest to the product or service they are pushing. Advertisers will love the ability to target their messages on a user-by-user basis, and Google will have the ability to charge a premium for such targeted delivery. While some view contextual advertising as a small price to pay for such extensive storage space free of pop-ups or banner ads, privacy advocates seem to have a different view.
An estimated 28 privacy and civil liberties groups throughout the world have written letters to Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page asking them to reconsider the automated scanning practice. These opponents argue that Gmail will scan and house important private information delivered to users via their email and that this information can be linked back to users’ personal account information. These groups compare Gmail to a stranger rooting through your mailbox. To make them even more nervous, Google has admitted that “deleted” messages may never be permanently removed from their servers – even if a user closes his/her account. Privacy advocates feel this sort of cyber scanning sets a dangerous precedent, even though Google promises that human eyeballs will never see the mail and that the company will keep the gathered information under tight security. Another concern is what happens to the information if Google were to go out of business, merge with another company or sell its Gmail service – as they don’t want this personal information leaking out of the Gmail system. Google insists the system is safe and private information is only used to deliver relevant commercial messages.
Along with privacy concerns, another foreseeable problem is the high probability that email marketing messages will be delivered to a user’s inbox alongside a competitor’s ad. For example, let’s say a user has signed up to receive contest notifications from Coca-Cola. Coke then sends an email outlining its upcoming Bengals' ticket giveaway to the user. The message arrives in the recipient’s mailbox, and Gmail scans it finding references to football, the NFL, a contest, etc. Gmail then delivers an ad for Pepsi’s million dollar punt, pass and kick sweepstakes right next to it because keywords extracted from the email show the recipient is interested in the same things outlined in Pepsi’s contest. You can see how email marketers might be a bit upset by this practice, as legitimate commercial emails could lost in the on-screen clutter.
A final potential pitfall is that the contextual advertising scanning system may not be perfect. For example, if a user is discussing the fact that he doesn’t like a particular product or service in his email, will the system direct an ad to him relating precisely to that product or service that he dislikes? In other words, the precise targeting of advertising messages may not be that precise.
Gmail is one new technology that is simultaneously good and bad for marketers. Email marketers will have a tougher time breaking through the clutter when their emails are read on the same screen as competing messages, but online advertisers will have the ability to target certain demographic and psychographic groups down to the individual user. It seems Gmail has significant advantages for both users and marketers, but the jury is still out on whether they outweigh the system’s noteworthy drawbacks.
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