By Robert Lockard

Search-engine giant Google is trying to buck the overall downward trend in Internet advertising sales by grabbing a bigger slice of the pie and by eating a little of TV’s pie, as well.

In my blog entry, “Google debuts ‘stock market’ for display ads,” I talked about Google’s attempt to make its new DoubleClick Ad Exchange successful. At the end I touched on Google’s attempts to grow beyond its core competency of search ads into the world of display ads. I’ll pick up where I left off.

According to the Wall Street Journal article, “Google Decides to Find Its Creative Side,” Google is trying to translate its ownership of YouTube and DoubleClick into a more dynamic advertising approach. Google is so well-known as the king of search ads that it might be difficult for it to break into Yahoo’s territory of creative display ads.

They’ve already created YouTube ad campaigns for J.C. Penney and Quaker Oats, but they saved their most innovative campaigns for Hewlett-Packard and Volvo. For those two companies, Google helped create YouTube ads and display ads featuring the latest updates (tweets) from Twitter.

Search engines are notoriously slow in catching up to social-media sites like Twitter and Facebook. You can read my insights into this topic in my eHarbor Blog entry, “Google can’t keep up with Twitter.” It’s a promising sign that Google is making this effort to use Twitter in its online-advertising services.

Google’s foray into YouTube might be the key to grabbing some of the TV industry’s advertising sales. In the United States, TV receives more ad revenue than any other medium. Google’s ad-sale growth has fallen from 56 percent in 2007 to 31 percent in 2008 down to 3 percent in the second quarter of 2009. It’s still growing, which is remarkable since we’re in the middle of a recession, but Google wants to stop the downward trend.

Can Google pull it off? They seem to be fighting a war on three fronts. They’re trying to hold on to search-ad dollars, which have fallen because of the recession, while also jumping into both display ads and TV-like ads. I won’t count them out because they might just have the resources and patience to do it. We’ll keep an eye on what happens.

This is a complete version of the eHarbor Blog post: “Google flexes its creative muscles.” The photo of the cat in the Coca-Cola box is from Flickr, and it is the copyright of Greencolander.