Could someone please point me to the spot in Google’s ads product to purchase these ads-in-navigation-directions? If these are really ads, there will be a place to buy them. Google doesn’t run ads for free.
They don't have to let small customers buy them, or put them up for auction like their other ads. Just offer it to big companies directly, especially ones that might be visual landmarks like a McDonald's or a Dunkin Donuts.
It's kinda funny that you think there are no B2B sales or promotions involved in the world's largest advertising business, even in the face of increasingly-numerous evidence of them doing so multiple times for many years. I agree most cases don't, but zero is laughably, trivially false.
Big businesses absolutely have inside access to get things done that are not generally available. Heck, that's practically Google's entire support strategy - know someone who knows someone, otherwise deal with the automation which just repeats "no" in a loop. Sometimes it's just because it's not ready for wider onboarding (big customers get tapped for trialing big new features (like Uber/Lyft/etc's rideshare integration in maps), not all of which ever go further), sometimes very clearly not. E.g. current Facebook/Google legal battles, like https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/14/google-facebook-ceos-oversaw... , and that's far from the first. It's just the latest and greatest and stands a chance of actually going somewhere.
Sure, they may not be phoning up a friend and passing $$ directly to dodge using the UI's pricing. Instead they get automation built for them, so they don't have to do that. Because you're right, it doesn't scale.
Imagine what the global political implications of a landscaping company located between a sex shop and cermatorium being able to place navigational ads might be!
