Hours before Google's DoubleClick acquisition passed the European Union's antitrust sniff test, Tim Armstrong, the search giant's North American president for advertising and commerce, said the
company would be "disappointed" if it didn't have "a very significant position" in display advertising by 2008-2009. Speaking at the Bear Sterns Media Conference, Armstrong described online video
sharing site YouTube as "the brightest light" for Google's display advertising potential, adding that the company's ad platform would evolve over time to the point where it wouldn't distinguish
between search and display ads.
The acquisition of DoubleClick gives Google the ability to make a significant push beyond search into the market for graphical ads, an area where Google
has yet to compete effectively with Yahoo and Microsoft.
Armstrong added that Google has also devoted engineering and sales teams to figuring out how best to utilize the rich data
from social networks to make money from ads. The company would love to scale the inventory provided by its new OpenSocial initiative, for example. Its advertising efforts on social networking giant
MySpace have been disappointing thus far.
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