• by Mark Naples , May 14, 2004

Remember when it was sort of cool that Carrie "Googled" her Russian artist boyfriend on HBO's "Sex and the City" last season? As a somewhat self-respecting male, I kind of hate that I know who Carrie is, let alone knowing that she did that. But, when "to Google" someone meant finding out on the quick who they were or what others had written about them, it was apparent that this brand of Search Engine had piqued the public consciousness in a way that made it clear what Google meant: Finding the right information fast.

Now that Google has launched Gmail, brilliantly - as I and others have chronicled, and this week launched AdWords Banner formats, can we expect the Google brand to soon mean something else?

I'm thinking that the Google brand will mean something along the lines of what people mean when they say that a business has been "Walmartized." Google may soon put all other online ad networks out of business because of the precision of its targeting, and the simplicity of its model.

Maybe I'm being too harsh. Maybe it'll be more of a cross between Wal*Mart, Engage, 24/7, and DoubleClick. Essentially, Google has decided that it can now revive the very ad format that has slowly died over the past few years, in part due to the popularity of search. The company has created a PPC, self-service, and contextually-served PPC online ad network. Sound familiar?

What makes Google think it can make banner ads work any better than other companies? Is it their 150,000+ advertisers? Or is it how their own brand has brought users to them? Is this why they're offering so many features in Gmail, like 500 times the storage of a Hotmail account? Are they anticipating another backlash that will make the privacy concerns over Gmail pale in comparison?

Perhaps none of this should be a concern. After all, this company is bringing Web users and influencer media to the water and letting them drink and drink. If you saw David Pogue's characterization of them in Thursday's New York Times, you know what I mean. The writer's whole piece, which was more of a Valentine, was on Google asserting the good in a "good versus evil" debate online. This isn't branding, it's uber branding!

Google loves that good versus evil characterization. I prefer to call it "good business for Google versus everyone else's bad." As with anything that appears to be very good, the devil is usually in the details. Now that Google's announced that it will deliver content targeted rich media too, the company has essentially created an eBay of online advertising, with an online marketplace of buyers (advertisers) and sellers (publishers) with the market determining pricing. This is probably going to be good business for Google, and I think we can all expect it to involve rich media sooner rather than later. But, just as DoubleClick, Engage, and 24/7 learned three years ago, it may not be good business for the medium as a whole.

As Anne Holland of Marketing Sherpa pointed out to me today, "It will be interesting to see if Google's also planning on distributing the graphic ads via Gmail, currently in beta. In the beta, AdSense text ads are included in some 3rd party emails. It's not clear yet if those ads will just be inserted into outbound mail sent by Gmail users or if they'll be included in in-bound mail too. Of course, this could mean your competitors' banners may show up on your own email campaigns... scary stuff."

No matter how you look at it, too much dominance sounds like too much. Google's recent announcements make me think that the company wants the Web to become "The Google." We'll see. At the very least, it's clear that the world's leading Search Engine will soon become the world's leading online media engine.