DM News: Commercial E-Mailers Weigh Gmail's Impact

Marketers using email as a medium are now left to wonder what impact an ad-supported email service will have on their communications. While not a new issue - as both Yahoo, MSN and other free web email providers have long used advertising around email messages to support their services - the launch of Google's new Gmail service started people thinking. Well, at least it got Jupiter analyst David Daniels thinking:

"It would represent a conflict for marketers, meaning it would indicate that the marketer would also have to pay a premium to ensure that they owned the top contextual ad placement in order to displace potential competitors from preying on their e-mail marketing campaigns."

The big difference between the Gmail service and the ads seen in other services presumably will be a greater degree of targeting of the adjacent text ads to the content of the email. Bigfoot Interactive's Michael Della Penna chimed in, noting that marketers consider themselves to have already paid for the attention of those readers. It seems that if an untargeted ad gets shown to readers, paying email marketers have less of an issue than if those piggy backing ads are targeted by content - which could lead to competitive ads appearing in marketer emails.