Google as an Agency?

September 19, 2007
by Richard Gregory

It doesn’t take much to get searchbloggers going in the US, where every utterance by the search engines is pored over, picked apart, sliced, diced and generally subjected to the most intense textual analysis.

No surprise then that news of Google’s newest recruit, a heavyweight Madison Avenue adman, has got the blog-noscenti buzzing with excitement.

The word is, a Mr Andy Berndt is packing it in as co-president of Ogilvy & Mather’s New York office so that he can join Google to “helm a new global unit dedicated to collaborating with marketers, agencies and entertainment companies”. (Helm as a verb? In America, why not? After all, it is the land of opportunity.)

Arch searchblogger John Battelle is no doubt about Google’s intentions. He writes: “…the trend is clear. Google is setting itself up as a full service advertising company. And that means client services and creative innovation”.

His implication, I think, is that ad agencies, whether specialists like Latitude or old school players like O&M, should be very worried indeed at the prospect of an already mighty Google steamrollering its way onto their turf.

I’m not so sure. For a start, this is hardly a new concern: the same threat was being voiced on mediapost nearly two years ago, and mostly, we’re all still here.

In my view that’s because Google, which has been broadening its range of products, ultimately wants to be seen as a full-service ad network, running the smoothest possible operation for the benefit of agencies and advertisers alike, rather than as an agency.

Personally I think it’s great that Google is leveraging the success of paid search advertising (the largest piece of the online marketing mix by a long way now) by taking the benefits of the channel —measurability, granularity and accountability – and applying them to other online and offline channels, where such attributes have been sadly lacking.

Looking down the Google-as-ad-agency path, the scope for conflicts of interest seems huge. Could a media owner (ie, Google), act impartially towards other media owners? Imagine if they were acting on behalf a large client like Walmart. How much of Walmart’s adspend do you think would end up on Yahoo and Microsoft properties?