• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, March 7, 2008

ORLANDO - Google is not out to disintermediate advertising agencies, but it looks as if it has it's heart set on disintermediating some other organizations that help agencies manage how they buy media. That was one of the takeaways from Google President-Advertising and Commerce, North America, Tim Armstrong during a keynote address Thursday at the American Association of Advertising Agencies Media Conference here.

Unveiling what Armstrong referred to as Google's "top secret strategy" for helping agencies transform the way they plan, buy and manage media - not just online, but across all their media options - Armstrong show a new "dashboard" approach it has developed for agencies for managing buys across media.

"It basically takes a mix of different media types and puts them together," he said, adding that the system, which is still being developed, was part of a suite of new tools Google is building to make the lives of media buyers "easier." The new dashboard, he said, would enable buyers to manage mixes of offline media like TV, radio and print campaigns, with their online display and search advertising, and to harness their data streams to show how one platform influences traffic to the others.

Armstrong described the dashboard as one of the things Google excecs have been drawing on "napkins" to better service agencies, but said he continues to be greeted by fear and trepidation from shops when he meets with them. To illustrate that point, Armstrong recalled an especially difficult sales call he was summoned to by Google CEO Eric Schmidt a while back with an agency chief who ripped Google's approach to the advertising marketplace. What did Armstrong do? He hired the exec, former Interpublic Chairman David Bell, to help design better systems for helping ad agencies.

It is the same spirit with which Google has recently begun striking alliances directly with agencies, such as its much publicized hook-up with Publicis, which Armstrong said was all about building "tools to help you guys scale."

One top media agency executive in the room told MediaDailyNews she loved what Google was doing, but not necessarily the way it was communicating it. "We always feel like they are talking down to us," she said.