Opinion: Google – An emerging monopoly?

Adplanner beta, DS3, DFP, DFA, Google Analytics – any guesses on what they have in common? What about Admob, Terracent, Admeld, Invitemedia, SocialGrapple & PostRank?

In case you have begun to wonder that this is a case of ‘overwork syndrome’ on a Friday, think again! All of these are labels that belong to the juggernaut amongst digital media platforms, who we know as Google, which has now begun to take the shape of what Xerox was in the yesteryears to Photostat / copier category.  The former set of labels comprise the names of audience analysis, ad broadcasting & management tools while the latter set represent names of mobile, social & display advertising & analytics companies that Google acquired between 2010-11.

For a lot of us who have spent a few years in this industry, to see the invisible link between all of these labels is not fraught with a lot of difficulty. The link is definitely there and the game plan that is as of yet immersed in the murk, will start to emerge soon enough as robust integration is achieved over a longer period of time between all of these labels.

What is the fabric that forms the common base for all of these imprints?

Connecting the dots:

Google Adplanner Beta (adplanner.google.com) is a powerful tool that Google had developed and refined in the last decade which allows marketers and agencies to quickly understand metrics such as reach, audience composition (stickiness) etc of web sites within a particular market. Given the tremendous volume of web sites that Google commands within the service called GDN (Google Display Network), such an audience analysis & media planning tool is able to create very robust outcomes in the form of media plans that work. This tools seems to be definitely conceived by the same brains who ran the old DoubleClick ad network of the 90’s and it doesn’t take too much effort for a planner to understand the power of this tool (including drawing out a robust set of media web sites based on interest, search query, similar website, geography type reference filers). Imagine being able to understand a list of sites in your market, visited by people who search for ‘fishing rods’?

DoubleClick for Advertisers and DoubleClick for Publishers  are celebrated ‘ad serving’ tools from the dot-com era which have been refined over the years by DoubleClick and now integrated in to the eco-system by Google (after the DoubleClick acquisition). DFA is a system that helps digital marketers & agencies to track, measure & analyze their Online display advertising programs while DFP is a system that sits in the publisher (media) side that enables them to track display advertising that runs on their own individual sites.

DS3 (aka Dart Search 3) is a completely revamped and rejuvenated Google version of the old Dart Search which falls under the Paid Search ‘bid management’ tool category which can handle your Paid Search programs across desktops and mobile devices. DS3 is being integrated in to systems like Adplanner Beta and DFA as we speak to cross-pollinate valuable intelligence on user behavior between Display & Search with the objective of being able to create Display & Search programs that work together towards common objectives and also arming marketers with mission-critical data on efficiently integrating Display / Paid Search programs. There are also similar (or at times same) systems that work ‘behind the scenes’ in the arena of MOBILE advertising via AdMob (remember the recent $750MM acquisition of the mobile company?) and VIDEO advertising via YouTube.

I am certain I do not have to try hard to explain Google Analytics (GA) to anyone reading this column. The simple Web analytics tools from the 2000s has slowly evolved to take the shape of a much more attractive and sophisticated tool with a huge winning proposition going for it – that it is still free! Evolution has seen GA offering propositions like the recent Multi-Channel funnels  that enables marketers to attribute performance across the multiple media channels that their programs may be running; an awesome feature in my opinion.

Cut to the recent acquisitions of Admeld, Invitemedia, Teracent (& Admob) which gave Google huge traction in the field of Demand Side Platforms (DSP) technology & Display management systems. While Invitemedia is a display platform that allows buyers to optimize online campaigns in real-time across multiple display ad providers including Yahoo’s Right Media Exchange and Google’s DoubleClick Ad Exchange, Teracent’s Intelligent Display Advertising technology creates display ads entirely customized to the specific consumer and site. Sum up GDN with Admob, Admeld, Teracent & DFP and couple this system with Invitemedia and there you are… a monstrous eco-system that may be compared to the current Google Adwords Paid Search system has already emerged!

The emerging G-nomy:

Imagine being able to login to a single system, do research on the potential audiences you want to target, add appropriate targeting & filters to those audiences, arrive at a satisfactory media delivery level and directly push out the display media plan that you just created with appropriate advertising tracking?

Imagine being able to login to the same console , do exhaustive research on search patterns & behavior of your audiences, arrive at an exhaustive search keyword pool, choose from auto-generated ‘search ad copy messages’ and push out your Paid Search campaign with appropriate tracking incorporated via Analytics system?

Imagine using the system to forecast traditional media metrics like ‘Reach and Frequency’ along with custom goals such as ‘Social action rates’, ‘Engagement/Interaction’ rates, Conversions, Revenues etc across multiple channels – Paid Search, Display advertising, Social media ads, Mobile channels etc?

Imagine again, being able to look at the final outcomes of a multimedia campaign using the reporting & analysis suite of the same system and being able to attribute individual media channel outcomes across multiple media and assess the final ‘combined media impact’?

I could go on discovering the mind-boggling possibilities that such an ECO-system could create but for now, I think I would rather trust your imaginations to run wild.

But does it take a lot of peering to behold a monstrosity controlled by the almighty Google emerging?