First, from Umair Haque via Steve Rubel…
Spending virtually nothing on advertising, Google has been confirmed as the top brand worldwide, surpassing such tried and true ad agency accounts as Coca Cola and General Electric.
And, as John Quelch observed,
With its emphasis on statistics over sizzle, on left brain rather than right brain marketing, Google has the leaders at many traditional advertising agencies running scared. Indeed, traditional advertising expenditures in the USA were flat in 2007, with media that depend heavily on local advertising from newspapers to the Yellow Pages losing ground as Google reaches out to small business advertisers in particular. As Maurice Saatchi says, a great global brand owns a word. Google owns the word search.
Google threatens the traditional agency model in several ways. First, Google collects money from advertisers on the basis of performance, not promise. As Sergey Brin says: “We are able to demonstrate value to advertisers in a way that has never been done before.†Second, Google is selling direct to advertisers as well as through the agencies who traditionally have charged clients a commission on their media purchases. Third, Google is running experiments that involve it gathering up unsold advertising inventory of magazine ad space or television ad time and auctioning it off electronically. Fourth, Google gives away advertising services (such as templates for creating ads) that agencies traditionally charge for and also enables advertisers to change ad copy easily and at low cost online. Finally, Google looks well-poised to take advantage of the next new frontier in advertising – mobile.
And then there’s this on infrastructure (via Paul Ford):
A Harper’s Magazine article by Ginger Strand, “KEYWORD: EVIL Google’s Addiction to Cheap Electricity.” The author opens our eyes to the massive cooling and computing power requirements of Google server farms and the global implications of “cloud computing” in general.
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