"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.