And Now .. Media Buying Dashboard From Google

After dominating virtually everything online , Google it seems is ready to give offline media buying agencies a run for its money.Indeed, the company has increasingly begun to see itself as a diversified media buying platform. Already print newspaper ad buying, radio and TV are integrated, to varying degrees, into AdWords. And last Thursday Google's Tim Armstrong outlined a provocative and much larger vision for the company that would incorporate it more centrally into major ad agencies' media buying and planning processes.

Tim is the President, Advertising and Commerce for Google in North America, while speaking at the American Association of Advertising Agencies Media Conference in Orlando, Florida outlines the Companies ambitious growth plans in various offline media.

According to MediaPost:

"Google offline media integration strategy basically takes a mix of different media types and puts them together," he said, adding that the system, which is still being developed, was part of a suite of new tools Google is building to make the lives of media buyers "easier." The new dashboard, he said, would enable buyers to manage mixes of offline media like TV, radio and print campaigns, with their online display and search advertising, and to harness their data streams to show how one platform influences traffic to the others.

The deep level of ad-agency integration that this implies would presumably enable Google to capture a larger slice of the brand advertising pie. However, several factors might conspire against Google in this scenario. Alley Insider gives a few reasons why Google might face some problems

* Agency fear and/or resistance
* Agency development of a competing system that accomplishes the same objectives more effectively and easily.
* The possibility that media buying cannot be automated to the degree Google assumes.There may be less room for automation, etc., in the ad-buying process than Google and other would like. Everyone in the ad business would like to reduce the amount of friction involved in buying ad time/space/etc. But unless everyone, on all sides of the transaction, are using the same system, this could still be a risk involved.

* The agencies could beat Google to it, using their own set of high-tech tools. This is exactly what WPP's Group M, among others, have been trying to do.
There may be less room for automation, etc., in the ad-buying process than Google and other would like. Everyone in the ad business would like to reduce the amount of friction involved in buying ad time/space/etc. But unless everyone, on all sides of the transaction, are using the same system, this could still be a "high touch" business.

Silicon Alley Insider also captures another level of potential resistance: "Google wants to be your media planner. And your research department. All functions that make up a big part of the giant ad conglomerates already." In other words, these are bread and butter agency functions that bring in revenue.

Regardless, there's a kind of "inexorable" logic to the Google cross-media dashboard. For the past several years, Google has envisioned itself as a more efficient way to buy media across the full range of advertising platforms and has very self-consciously been moving toward this goal.

source:searchengineland.com