• Advertising Age, Wednesday, October 8, 2008 12 PM

What's wrong with the Internet? For starters, it's a "cesspool," a festering sea of bad information, said Google CEO Eric Schmidt yesterday while talking to a group of visiting magazine executives at the company's Mountain View, Calif. Campus during the American Magazine Conference. The cure? More brands!

"Brands are the solution, not the problem," Schmidt said. "Brands are how you sort out the cesspool." But Schmidt wasn't all sunshine and compliments. He roundly criticized the Association of National Advertisers for opposing Google's planned ad deal with Yahoo. He also declined to advise magazine executives on how to rank higher on Google's page-ranking programs. "We don't actually want you to be successful," he said.

Still, Schmidt did concede that Google was dependent on magazines and their old-media brethren in some fairly significant ways. "We don't do content," he said. "You all create content. It's a natural partnership."

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