Gobbled by Google

"The fox is in the henhouse and it's going to gobble a good part of this business up before anybody realizes they're history," said Gene DeWitt, president of DeWitt Media Solutions.

A story in today's New York Times [registration required] catalogs moves by Google, Yahoo, and eBay to increase their print and TV ad-selling businesses. Although the rise of these new-media giants sounded the death-knell of the old media titans, they aren't dead yet and, as it turns out, have found a home for the time-being in the growth strategies of their conquerors.

This news mirrors the marketing career trends I addressed in my last post. Just as marketers must be able to plan, manage, and integrate programs across old and new media, albeit with their feet firmly planted in the latter, the companies that they are working with and for are striving to do exactly the same thing.

There is another career-related moral in this story and it involves "disintermediation." From the outset, it was recognized that the web (or, in the broadest sense, the networked world) eliminates the middleman: Why go to the retail outlet when you can buy directly from the manufacturer? Google is changing the landscape of media buying along the same lines. They are on their way to becoming the one-stop-shop for buying space across the media spectrum. To that extent, they make the job of media buyer easier. But the next logical step will be to introduce more tools and automation that could make the role of media buyer (or even the ad agency itself) obsolete.

Of course, this challenge could itself present a new opportunity. Tim Armstrong, Google's vice president for ad sales, points out that the ability to target advertising to smaller and smaller audiences across a wide range of media actually increases the complexity of media buying. As the actual purchasing of media becomes exceedingly simple, the critical players will be media planners and strategists helping their clients understand and navigate their numerous options so as to optimize spend. At the same time, automation often brings with it the need for customization, which in turn calls for people able to manipulate and maximize the efficiency of technical systems.

Google's '05 annual report acknowledged that "large advertisers would most likely continue to focus most of their ad budgets on traditional media," which means that traditional media buying isn't going away immediately. Still, if we can reasonably conceive of the end, can it really be far off? Paul Lavoie of Taxi, an ad and design agency, suggests that Google could become the largest ad agency in the foreseeable future. That possibility should remind us that, as powerful as the "traditional media" may be for now, the term "traditional" always refers to the past.