• by Dave Morgan , Featured Contributor, May 24, 2007

What a month. Over the past four and one-half weeks, we've seen more than $12 billion in announced acquisitions in the online advertising industry. Between Google's $3.1 billion purchase of DoubleClick and last week's $6 billion acquisition of aQuantive by Microsoft came Yahoo's $680 million acquisition of Right Media, WPP's $649 million acquisition of 24/7 Real Media, Hachette's $110 million purchase of Jumpstart Automotive Media, and AOL's pick-up of Ad-Tech. In just a few short weeks, the entire landscape of the online ad industry seems to have changed. Lots of people are trying to understand what is going on and why this is happening now. I've been in the media business for the better part of the past 30 years, with almost one-half of that time working in the Internet and new media. While the pace and size of these deals may seem a bit dizzying to some, I think that there are some pretty clear market signals being expressed in these deals. Here is how I read it:

Media "no-man's land." Historically, there have always been clear lines separating the buy side and sell side in traditional media and advertising. Media companies acquired audience and sold advertising to marketers (or most often to their designated intermediaries, ad/media buying agencies.) When media companies wanted more scale or access to more advertisers, they created networks with other media companies or they hired representative firms to sell on their behalf. Generally, they tended to be very respectful of working through marketers agencies, rather than selling to them directly. And, when they did want to meet with the client, they informed the agencies in advance.

On the buy side, agencies focused their efforts on serving their client interests, and relied on media companies as the primary conduit to communicate with consumers. They avoided creating or owning media properties of their own, or even buying and brokering media in bulk (until the rise of the media agencies). This gave birth to the famous "3s" of television media buying in the '80s -- three phone calls to the three networks, three martinis over lunch and headed home on the three o'clock train to Darien. Those were the old rules and everyone avoided going into "no-man's land," the gentlemanly space between media buyers and media sellers.

Boundaries blurring. While these rules, even in traditional media, have been under pressure for years and started to change with the emergence of media specialist firms, it took the Internet to set the rules on their head. Both Google and Yahoo have been massive, multi-billion-dollar advertising businesses selling ads directly to marketers, though their direct efforts have been heavily focused on small and medium- sized businesses. AQuantive, one of the world's largest online ad agencies, has been operating an owned and operated media brokerage business in-house for the past three years. And even large traditional media companies, like Time Warner, have built in-house "creative services" companies that not only come up with big ideas for marketers, but even create the ads in-house as well.

These intrusions into the "no-man's land" have been limited, talked about, but tolerated as everyone recognized that the Internet was likely to reshape the media landscape and no one was quite sure how things were going to shake out. Certainly, with its purchase of DoubleClick, media seller Google is clearly invading the "no-man's land," since DoubleClick serves ads for almost one-half of all interactive ad agencies. So is agency holding company WPP with its deal for 24/7 Real Media, since the company is not only a large provider of ad-serving to publishers, but also operates an online media network. And, with Microsoft's purchase of aQuantive, an online ad agency with a significant business in Web site design, creative development and media buying, the company didn't just assault the "no-man's land," it crossed over to the other side. If the boundaries were starting to blur before, this past few weeks have really started to cloud the picture.

Boundary Blurring Accelerating. This phenomenon -- the "cross-border" movements of online media buyers and media sellers -- is not only likely to continue over the course of the next several years, but it is likely to accelerate. The Internet is fragmenting and disrupting traditional media. Business models are changing, and until the online advertising market hits a point of significant maturity, which might not happen for eight to 10 years, it is likely that more and more media sellers and media buyers will rewrite the rules, and further blur the boundaries between themselves, as they innovate new business models to grow their businesses and better serve consumers.

The future is about data and data transparency. Many are wondering how companies operating in online media will truly know whether potential partners or customers or suppliers are friend or foe. Historically, media value has been created through planning, buying, selling, creating, delivering and measuring media. Much of the value has been in the process, and in that world, the roles and relationships of partners and an alignment of interests have been critical for success.

Since we are unlikely to have the same kind of clear boundaries online that we have had in traditional media, data ownership will define how companies work together. Companies will stake their positions by what consumer data they collect, who they share it with and who they don't, and how they monetize it. Publishers and ad sellers will try to own and control the most valuable data about audiences and how they interact with media. Agencies and media buyers will try to own and control the most valuable data about campaigns and marketing programs and how consumers have interacted with them. Marketers and retailers will try to control the most valuable data about how prospects and customers have interacted or transacted with them. When these companies "partner," they will provide transparency with each other and share or match data under pre-set terms. When they compete or take proprietary positions with respect to each other, they will "black box" the data and only provide results or programs.

What signs do we have they the "media economy" may be shifting to a "data economy"? Just look no further than the headlines over the past weeks on stories discussing these big transactions. Data was in the headlines of all of them. Need more proof? Within the past couple of weeks, we also saw two other big transactions that got lost in the attention provided to the online ad deals. Alliance Data was acquired by Blackstone for $7.8 billion, and Acxiom was acquired by Silver Lake and ValueAct Capital for $3 billion. What do those companies do? Manage consumer data for marketing programs. The tea leaves are there to be read.