Yesterday, Google finalised their acquisition deal of DoubleClick, a company that offers an awesome range of online marketing products to advertisers, publishers and agencies.
One immediate question comes to mind:
What does it mean for all other agencies and Adwords advertisers?
In my opinion, it sure looks like Google is trying to position themselves as an agency. Just look at features on Adwords like the Conversion Optimizer, Budget Optimizer, etc. Now that they have a full blown campaign management system at their disposal, I think it might become increasingly difficult to sell bid and campaign management tools, etc as Google releases them for free on Adwords. This means that agencies will have to make greater effort to position themselves as marketing specialists and not just service providers with great tools. More companies will most likely do or try to do their marketing campaigns in-house.
If you take a step back and look at the internet and how it has become more user friendly over the past couple of years, especially with the immersion of web 2.0, one can start to see a trend. A few years ago, companies had to pay fortunes to get websites done for them and pay even more to have a content management system behind it. These days, with hundreds of web development tools, content management systems and blogs freely available, it has become much easier and cheaper to get your company online. I believe the same is happening with the marketing of these sites. It’s fast becoming much easier to effectively manage your own campaigns, etc. with the launch of every new product. The difference is that when you want an exceptional website or an exceptional marketing campaign, you still and will always need a specialist with passion for what he or she does, in order to make the project stand out from the rest.
In the long run I believe there will always be a need for specialist online marketing agencies as online marketing is not a science, but rather an art form, which needs a passionate artist to make it a big success.
Last week, somebody from Google made a crucial mistake, which sparked a flurry of cross channel marketing attempts.
On Friday morning when I looked at my inbox, I found a mail from the Google Advertising Professional team which at first seemed like just another mail from them asking advertisers to participate in one of their online surveys. In this case, the survey was to help them gather information about a potential new proposal document for advertisers to use when pitching to clients.
After reading the mail I noticed that for some reason the sender left all the “to” addresses in the mail, visible to everyone. As you can imagine, this list could be quite valuable as it is a real list, with real advertisers and no fake or generated email addresses… Almost immediately one of the recipients replied with an attempt to advertise his own marketing company. Soon after that the original sender replied, apologising for the mistake and asking everybody to respect their fellow Adwords advertisers and not to use the list for their own marketing attempts. The apology did not help and quite a few emails rolled in after that, some of them even stating that this is an opportunity not to be missed. Most of the opportunists asked for referrals and offered rewards for them.
Personally I don’t think spamming the list is the right thing to do. I did however appreciate the opportunity to go and check out my competitors without much effort in finding them. It’s easy to find the company website by looking at the email addresses. Looking at their websites, you can quickly get a very good image of the companies and decide if you want to try and align yourself or partner with them or not.
My advice to the people who have the list is to use the list to find the companies you think would be good for you to partner with and then contact them via the appropriate channels and to stop spamming the list.
To summarise, I think it leaves a bad impression when you are supposed to be a credible search marketing company, but yet, make use of the first dodgy opportunity you get to market yourself… O yes, and of course it’s good to see that even somebody working for Google can make a mistake 
