March 14, 2008 | Friday
The troubling bit of Google’s DoubleClick acquisition
By Richard Gregory - COO in Display |News |Search Engines |Google |Microsoft
We are a platform, not an agency...We do not have, nor want to develop, the skills that agencies offer advertisers.
So says Google in a mass email to British agencies about the finalisation of the DoubleClick acquisition. When weighed against the facts, it’s enough to make one think that Google doth protest too much.
Google bought Performics as part of this purchase. Performics does PPC and SEO. This is a clear conflict of interest: Google is now competing as an agency. This is a particularly bad deal for advertisers, as buying Google inventory from a Google agency is so rife with conflict.
Danny Sullivan has minced no words in calling on Google to divest itself of Performics. Asking Google to “do the right thing” in a detailed and well-reasoned post, Sullivan writes:
Even if Performics is kept completely separate from the Google search team, there’s the impression that Performics might have some special “in” with Google’s non-paid search results. After all, Google owns it! It’s also not hard to imagine that despite all the best intentions, some new sales rep might pitch that Performics has some type of in. That a bad thing.
...A purchase initially worth more than $3 billion, and Google still hasn’t assessed that Performics poses such a huge conflict to own? Disappointing. Google should have announced a spin-off yesterday. I’d hope they’ll rapidly move forward with doing that.
On another point, the completion of the DoubleClick deal now makes it seem more likely that Microsoft will release a free version of Atlas as a result of its aQuantive purchase.
Speaking of software, Google has also announced the beta release of its free ad-serving platform, Google Ad Manager, which will be competing with DoubleClick’s (not free) DART. Clearly this will feed the hunger for information on individuals and companies that Google is doing all it can to satisfy. But will it - or the stamp of approval on the DoubleClick deal - stop the share slump? Watch this space…
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