Good ol' Marketing Pilgrim has come through again with more information on Google Audio Ads.  I've been quite curious (and more than a little skeptical) of the service since day one.  And the folks at Marketing Pilgrim keep dishing out information on the service that I can't find anywhere else.

Jeremy Luebke takes us on a screenshot visual tour of the AdWords-style interface behind Google Audio Ads and I have to admit… I'm impressed.  It looks easy.  Very easy.  In fact, it looks like something that folks with little or no radio advertising experience could pick up and use.  But I can't say I'm surprised.  Google is pretty good at making things easy.

There are several other aspects of the service that look impressive:

• Google has built the ability to search out and contact professional radio ad specialists right into the interface.  You're given the option to specify how much you want to spend, when you need the ad, and any specific services you need… and Google spits back a list of specialists and bios from which to choose.  Nice touch, G!
• A 27-day run, with more than a million anticipated listeners and over 900 plays, costs just short of $1000.  That's much, much better than the extraordinary amounts being reported during the past several weeks.
• Google provides a lot of targeting options:  demographics (age, gender, etc), location, radio station format, days of the week, times of day, etc…

As usual, Google isn't quite as upfront with reporting as some might like.  They don't tell you which stations your ads are playing on and they don't give you the ability to single out specific stations that you'd rather your ads not play on.  But maybe we can expect those options in the future.

I'm still not sold on the radio advertising.  I'm a little closer… but not quite.  Without using the system myself I can't say for certain, but it looks like Google has successfully merged the radio advertising interface into the existing AdWords dashboard.  I'll hold out my final verdict until we see more hard evidence that advertisers and radio stations like the system.

Until then it's just a pretty face.  But there's something to be said about that in and of itself.

Correction:  My fingers got ahead of my brain when I wrote this yesterday.  As Jeremy pointed out in the comments, the $1000 does not buy you a 27-week run.  I meant to put "27-day".  $1000 gets you a 27-DAY run… not 27 weeks.