• ClickZ, Thursday, January 25, 2007 11 AM

As it expands into new ad mediums, including radio, print and TV, Google is no longer enjoying the favorable opinion of many brand advertisers. They feel its approach to ad-serving is actually more limiting than expansive.

"If I've got a brand campaign and a tenth of the campaign is running through Google, in my mind it takes away the advertising efficiencies," Jeff Marshall, managing director and vice president of media agency Starcom IP.

But Google doesn't control display, a world that includes a growing multitude of significant players. In the end, its closed-off stance hurts the Web giant most, says AKQA's Andrew O'Dell, whose client list includes several national brand advertisers.

As Google's AdSense expands its ad platforms to try and compete with the likes of Advertising.com and 24/7 Real Media, etc., he says it will have to open its doors to companies like DoubleClick or aQuantive's Atlas, which help marketers consolidate their serving and reporting across hundreds of different Web publishers.

It's an odd twist on the online music-DRM controversy, and you'd think the deployment of such proprietary technologies is very un-Google.

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