• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, December 21, 2005

At first glance, a help-wanted ad posted on online job boards last week for a New York-based media buyer looks like thousands of others placed by Madison Avenue each year: "Requirements. 3+ years experience in media buying for a large advertiser or agency. Strong negotiation and analytical skills. Proven track record of exceeding goals." What makes it remarkable is its sponsor - Google - and its timing, coming just months into a "test" the Internet search engine has been conducting, in which it buys and re-sells advertising space in offline media. To date, Google executives say it has been just that: a test. They also say it has been confined to print media, though they are evaluating whether to expand into other media as an extension of what they've been doing online all along: using Google's technology to serve relevant, targeted ad messages on behalf of advertisers and agencies.

But that doesn't explain the growing sense of angst among some of Madison Avenue's top executives when they allude mysteriously to Google's plans for muscling into the media planning and buying business, fearful that the highly capitalized company plans to muscle into Madison Avenue's turf.

"When Google takes on the print industry, which they are starting to do, it's going to be huge," Peter Gardiner, chief media officer of New York ad agency Deutsch fretted during a recent Advertising Women of New York panel discussion. "They're expanding that to every medium. When they become the search engine for everything the lines really cross over."

Asked to explain his anxiety in detail, Gardiner demurred, alluding to confidential talks Google executives have been holding directly with marketers and some agency executives, as well as some recent hires it has made of people with traditional ad agency experience.

Gardiner is not the only Madison Avenue big shot to express concerns about Google publicly. During his presentation earlier this month at UBS' Media Week conference in New York, Martin Sorrell, chairman-CEO of the world's biggest buyer of media - WPP Group - raised it as an important issue.

"Google has talked directly to advertisers in the United States about media buying exchanges," said Sorrell, adding, "Strange things are going on at the same time."

When pressed, ad industry executives don't seem to be able to articulate their precise concerns, but cite Google's rapid growth, its sky-high capitalization, and the huge amounts of cash sitting on its books, and its rapid expansion into new, and seemingly nonaligned areas of its core search business. In fact, Madison Avenue's Google angst is reminiscent of similar trepidations it had about Enron Corp. about five years ago when Enron - a then high-flying, expansionistic new economy player, began muscling into Madison Avenue's world with a new division dubbed Enron Media Services. That unit went belly-up along with the rest of Enron, but not before it got a lot of senior players in the ad business thinking about whether there might be other ways to handle media planning and buying, and whether their might be room for new players.

For their part, Google executives say their movements into media services are largely misunderstood on Madison Avenue, and that they are working hard to correct that with a variety of new programs designed to assist and educate agencies on how they can work more closely and more effectively with Google, not to compete with them.

"They don't have a full understanding of exactly what Google's mission is from an ad side of the business," says Chris LaSala, the Google executive who is developing the new agency programs. LaSala, who has the seemingly enigmatic title of "head of agencies," acknowledges that, "It's natural for them to have these thoughts," but says his job is to educate and correct that.

"More or less, I exist to make sure that Google, as an organization, is doing things to the benefit of the agency community," he explains, sharing with MediaDailyNews an agency outreach program Google has begun developing as part of its mission to grow its role in online media buying, and likely to expand it into offline media.

While he sits inside Google's burgeoning advertising sales organization headed by Vice President-Advertising Sales Tim Armstrong, LaSala's role is an interdisciplinary one, serving as a liaison between Google's marketing, sales, finance, legal and product development teams and the ad agencies they all interact with.

"From an advertising standpoint, we don't have as stated a mission," he acknowledges, adding that if Google were to state it, it would read as, "To provide targeted relevant advertising to a consumer of media" and to "leverage technology to do that with scale.

"It's not to do media planning and buying," he continues. "Our mission is around technology and scale. The goal is to do that to the benefit of anyone involved: agency, direct customer, big customer, and small customer. To say that we're competing, or that we're getting into that business would be unfair, primarily because what we are doing to support the agency as a customer is quite significant."

Specifically, LaSala cites three programs initiated by Google in the past year. One is an agency training program Google has formalized, which uses a combination of on-site seminars and online webinars that are customized to the needs of individual agencies and their account rosters. The seminars are designed to educate agencies, especially general market agencies that might not be as intimate as search engine marketing (SEM) specialists about how Google works, and how it can benefits specific client goals. During the fourth quarter alone, LaSala says Google has conducted "in excess" of 25 agency training sessions.

A second new program is a system of "agency development managers" Google has begun deploying in regional offices who function as account directors to work with specific shops to help develop programs that will serve their clients' marketing programs. LaSala declined to say how many of the agency development managers Google has deployed to date for proprietary reasons, but he described their job function as generating information, ideas and programs that will help the agencies and their clients grow their businesses via Google. Examples include the original research, co-development of case studies, as well as helping agencies develop "new business opportunities" that could make them even bigger customers for Google. "We've invested a lot in it," says LaSala.

The third element is less structured, but equally important. It involves working with Google's product development team to create new products that will help fulfill the goals of agencies and their clients. The outreach is key, says LaSala, because it's working with general market agencies, as well as SEMs to create new advertising opportunities.

In fact, Google's print-buying program, and the new media buying positions it is recruiting for are a direct outgrowth of that initiative, which originated from a new agency "council" Google has created, which periodically convenes groups of agency "thought-leaders" in its Mountain View headquarters or New York offices to brainstorm new ideas (see related story in today's edition).

As for the media buyers Google has begun recruiting, LaSala says they won't be functioning as buyers in the conventional sense, but are intended to help Google understand the needs, issues and functions of agency media buyers so they can better serve them. "It's all media-related," he says, adding, however, that the buyers won't necessarily be operating as an "in-arm media shop."

However, Google appears to be recruiting a number of them. Since last week, multiple ads have appeared on leading online job boards ranging from Monster to Craig's List.

Meanwhile, LaSala acknowledges that Google needs to do an even better job of communicating its developments to agencies. Because it conveys so much information, so fast, much of it is often "programmatic" and that, he says, creates situations where agencies learn about developments through hearsay, or through the press, which can breed rumor, innuendo, and speculation that Google is doing things other than what it may necessarily intend to communicate.