• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, June 6, 2012

Google's brass ring to design a complete stack of services for advertisers and marketers through DoubleClick Digital Marketing (DDM) would give publishers, agencies and marketers one dashboard to access a variety of tools, eventually bringing it more of the billions in advertising still spent offline. But the complicated project could have serious flaws.

Blaming technology for failing creative pieces isn't the answer. Some agency execs believe technology gets 80% of the attention; and creativity, 20%.

The next evolution in the ad dashboard would bring in the creative process, but there are more pressing issues, according to Jeff Gores, SVP of search and performance in North America at Media Contacts, speaking from a Google customer conference in Dana Point, Calif. "They did not speak about addressing social, especially the walled environment of Facebook," he said.

Agencies and brands need more access to social services -- something the Mountain View, Calif. company cannot provide through Facebook because the social network refuses to take down the walled garden and allow Google access to data through an application programming interface (API).

Marketers concerned with putting all their eggs in one basket could present more challenges, according to Will Margiloff, CEO of IgnitionOne. Some might even resist Google in terms of buying media from the seller of the media, alhough marketers have talked about consolidating the ad tech stack for years. "Marketers need centralized data, centralized management and centralized optimization of all media channels," he said. "The fragmented tech landscape has made this difficult, and it has been one of our main goals to consolidate and simplify this chaos for our clients."

Margiloff said once marketers get a taste of consolidated technology, there will be little chance of them going back to the bad old days of cobbling together many different technology platforms.

DDM is not likely to provide the entire picture, and that's why companies like Media Contacts and IgnitionOne created tools that allow buyers to track numbers across media.

Google will attempt to do for the online ad industry what Oracle, IBM, SAP, Microsoft, Salesforce and others did for enterprise applications. They brought together on the back end inventory ordering and control, CRM, purchasing, warehouse management, human resources and financial systems. It took years for these companies, through trial and error, to figure out how to give employees one view.

Enterprise systems enable companies to match customer demand with inventory. Sound familiar?