According to Read/Write Web, Google's moving to reorganize the way they serve large advertising customers:
"Three of my most credible resources, including DM News’s Giselle Abramovich, are indicating plans for a significant re-organization at Google. On the re-org, says Ms. Abramovich,
“What this means is that there would be one global account director per account, that pulls in resources to sell as needed – PPC (pay-per-click), Print, Radio, Video, Display, etc.”
This means Google will utilize different types of ads (CPC, CPM, CPA, etc) over all media channels – search, mobile, video, audio, etc.
The benefit for Google's customers is that it enables them to target certain leads across different types of media. They can do that from one 'console' and they will work with 1 Google salesperson/account manager on their account. Of course will the large advertising agencies be happy with this scenario of Google providing a one-stop shop?
In some ways, it doesn't make a difference to the big agencies. They're still going to be the strategic adviser to the advertiser. Of course, they lose some of the advertising channel fragmentation that made their planning and trafficking services necessary, but having Google consolidate a bunch of channels may lower costs for everyone.
This is the way big brand advertisers want to do business—one point of contact to control their targeting and spend.
The big losers will be the smaller players in the search ecosystem with significant large-scale clients: the larger, dedicated search engine markeitng (SEM) firms. Their promise was to optimize search campagins horizontally across search engines, so an advertiser (or their agent) would go to them to spend across multiple search engines. Google can ace them out with this reorganization, based in part on their increasing dominance of search engine marketing, and assuming they can find the right inventory and technology to support a major advertiser's brand and rich media campaigns (ie, stuff that isn't search). You can bet YouTube figures into that thinking. For smaller-scale advertisers, where search is the the biggest, if not only, line item in their marketing budget, this doesn't mean much—they'll still need search marketing consolidators.
It's an interesting hint of a maturing Google.
Tags: Google, advertising, search engine marketing