In the last two weeks, two of Google's efforts to expand its brand and modus operandi into the realm of traditional media have been brought to a halt. 

In January, Google announced it was shutting down Google Print Ads, and just last week it announced it was shutting down Google Radio Automation.

The reasons for shutting each down are the same: There just hasn’t been as much success here as Google had hoped when it launched both of initiatives.

I've read some reports that have said that the media buying process for both these efforts is the cause for failure. Radio and print are both dying forms, and any business based on them was doomed to fail. 

But I don't think this is the case.

No medium has ever entirely replaced another. Formats may disappear (think 8-track), but media persist. And some formats return -- I saw records for sale at Best Buy the other day, and Amazon is selling vinyl these days. Print will always be part of the marketing mix, it will just be different -- how it is consumed and how it works as a marketing tool.

Google's failure has three root causes. 

The first cause is genetic. The very DNA of the company is antithetical to the other kinds of businesses to which it hopes to gain entrance. Top-down, Google has a zealous adherence to the belief that all media can be bought and planned better when subjected to engineering. Certainly more inventory on the marketplace can benefit from being subjected to automation and a bid/auction market, but perhaps not nearly as much as Google had hoped.
A lot of marketing and advertising relies on ideas, (seemingly less so these days, but still... ) and only humans have those. None of this is to say that Google can't use its vast resources to hire those people -- and it may very well -- but it is going to have to commit top-down to the notion of a human endeavor.

Which suggests the second reason...

No "brand association." Google extended its brand into businesses where it simply had no association in the minds of consumers (i.e. media buyers). Media buyers online know Google.  Clients know Google. Both have seen it necessary to make relating with Google the domain of their search specialists. But those small advertisers that are dealing with Google's automated bid and buy system directly aren't typically also running print and radio.

Print buyers are the ones buying print, and radio buyers are the ones buying radio. And these media have processes in place that, while not perfect, work pretty well for the most part. There is always greater efficiency when every process can be made to yield, but the psychic effort required to do that might take longer to recoup from those efficiencies than is worthwhile.

Add to that the tradition and relationships that the business rests on, neither of which Google has as part of its DNA as a business. I was talking with someone earlier today -- an online guy, very data-driven -- and he said that one of the biggest factors in whom he does business with is based on his relationships and the service those relationships bring to his business. That is not what Google does well, nor does it rely on relationships for success.

What Google does well is automation and analytics, which brings me to the third reason for the demise of its radio and print efforts...

Analytics. Google's foremost strength in the marketplace is analytics. Google connects words that vast numbers of people associate with things and events, to those things and events. It also collects vast amounts of data on how those words are used by people. Google is very, very good at connecting the dots between latency expressed by a search term (what a person wants, needs, has a passing but articulated fancy in) and the actions that ensue as a result.

This is all possible in no small part because the platform for the expression of the latency -- i.e. a search term -- is the same platform on which the actions are taken in response to the results generated from that search term. The same simply isn't true for print and radio. Google's strength is its analytics ties to causality, not correlation. This is why it is going to stick to things like streaming audio or online video. And regular television remains viable -- at least so far -- as the system in place to track response to the advertising.

Automation and analytics are desperately important to advertising from here on out, but not for all advertising, and every medium isn't always well suited to the systems that provide that automation and analytics.

Media strategies editor Jim Meskauskas is vice president and director of online media for ICON International Inc., an Omnicom company.