Marc E. Babej counters Scott Donaton’s rant on Google, and the need for media agencies to “stop complaining and start competing.”
Media agency complacency is neither here nor there, and it’s not the issue. Donaton misses the larger point – that Google is out of any media agency’s league, for three reasons. First, as the owner of one of the most comprehensive repositories of behavioral and contextual data in existence, Google enjoys a tremendous competitive advantage when it comes to serving targeted advertising. Second, as Google is about to demonstrate, this advantage can be leveraged beyond the Internet, to other media. Third, a battle for scale and scope is also a battle of resources; and with a market cap of $110 billion (compared to Omnicom’s 15 billion), Google’s resources are larger by several orders of scale than those of any advertising industry competitor.
It remains to be seen whether Google’s targeted text-based ads which have served them so well in the online environment will work on TV. Or if that’s even what they have planned for TV. Whatever the case, Google is not the enemy. Dogged resistance to change is the enemy.