Ken Auletta - Googled - The End of the World as We Know It

In the world of online advertising and marketing, DoubleClick was as dominant in its arena-placing display advertising-as Google was in placing text ads. DoubleClick provides the digital platform that allows sites like MySpace to sell online ads and advertisers and ad agencies to buy them, with DoubleClick culling from its database the information that targets the ads. The acquisition gave Google “an opportunity to be the infrastructure backbone for all ad-serving on the Internet,” said a worried Wenda Harris Millard, then Yahoo’s chief sales officer. In addition to potentially controlling the plumbing, DoubleClick offered rich new data-mining possibilities. By combining DoubleClick’s data with its own, Google would house an unrivaled trove of data. As Randall Rothenberg, the CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, said the day the deal was announced, “You can dive deep into that data and say, who were those people, where do they live, what were they doing when they looked at those ads?”

DoubleClick’s promotional materials boast that they “track more than 100 metrics,” including which ads users download, how long they view them, where they scroll, what links they click on, if they view an ad and later visit the site, what products interest them, what ads “resonate the most,” what they buy and choose not to buy, and how much they spend. According to then CEO David Rosenblatt, the company delivered as many as twenty billion online ads each day. For the “sell side” (the content providers, who in the online world are called publishers), DoubleClick provides tools that help them evaluate the inventory they have to sell and where to target it, delivers the ads, and reports the results. For “the buy side” (advertisers), it provides the same service.

Google’s purchase of DoubleClick triggered a flurry of digital advertising acquisitions. Within months, Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft, and the WPP advertising/marketing colossus each swallowed online marketing agencies that compete with DoubleClick, with Microsoft spending six billion dollars, twice what Google had paid, to buy aQuantive. Why the rush to acquire digital ad agencies? And why was DoubleClick sold?

Since DoubleClick and Google share the same one-square-block building on West Fifteenth Street in Manhattan, CEO Rosenblatt joked that the free food was an enticement. But the main reason was that he saw the sell side changing. DoubleClick had promised to transform the business of selling remnant ads, the roughly 30 percent of an ad seller’s inventory that is hardest to sell: the least read part of the magazine, the least watched TV shows, the least listened to radio programs. Selling these remnant ads was becoming more expensive for DoubleClick, and Rosenblatt feared that a Google or a Yahoo would come along and offer to sell these for free in exchange for an opportunity to sell more of a client’s premium advertising, luring away his customers. DoubleClick needed to widen its scope. “We were selling transmissions. We were not in a position to sell cars,” he said. In Google, Rosenblatt saw not just “the single best monetization engine on the Web,” and a company with a base of over one million advertisers, but more vitally, a fellow and necessary “middleman” who did not compete with clients by entering the content business.

DoubleClick offered Google a way to pool the two databases and their networks of advertisers. But DoubleClick also brought something Google lacked: a dominant online position in display advertising (banner and video ads), which meshed nicely with YouTube’s video offerings and Google’s narrower text-based expertise. Tim Armstrong, Google’s president, advertising and commerce, North America, envisioned three advantages for Google: better measurement of all online advertising, from text ads on search results to display ads on YouTube; better targeting of ads, which pleases both consumers and advertisers; and finally, higher fees for these better targeted, better measured, ads. Google’s game plan, said Richard Holden, its product management director, is simple: “We’d like to create one-stop shopping for advertisers.”

With reason, the advertising bears translated “one-stop shopping” to only-stop shopping, provoking dread about market domination. Rosenblatt, a bald, cheerful man of forty-one with a bright smile that provides cover for the technologist within, rises and goes to the whiteboard in his office to draw what he envisions as the future of advertising. Between “buyer” and “seller” he elongates an “ad exchange,” a clearinghouse for all online inventory to be sold. There could be many of these, but Rosenblatt, who would become Google’s president, display advertising, makes clear he hopes the Google/DoubleClick exchange will be dominant. This new approach can be much more efficient, he thinks, likening it to how online trading siphoned business from brokerage houses. Imagine, he said, that “instead of just selling remnant advertising to the exchange, the seller said, ‘We’ll expose all of our inventory onto this ad exchange. Maybe we’ll carve out a small percent-maybe ten percent-of the really premium stuff and our sales force will sell that directly. But this other stuff”-he acknowledged that the distinction between remnant and premium ads can be arbitrary-“’I don’t know where the line goes. I don’t want to figure out where it goes. Instead, I want the ad network to bid.”‘

Why shouldn’t a media buying agency, such as Irwin Gotlieb’s GroupM, conclude that DoubleClick/Google might gobble his piece of the advertising pie by offering to charge, say, 2 percent rather than his 4 or 5 percent? And by promising better data about what ads worked? Irwin Gotlieb did see DoubleClick and its ad exchange as a potential disrupter. He was uncomfortable with the wealth of data that Google would now possess, and could one day refuse to share with advertisers. He was uncomfortable with Google’s dominant market share. He was wary of its deals with EchoStar satellite television and Clear Channel radio and some newspapers, allowing Google to serve as the media-buying middleman for their online ads. He was rightly concerned that Google could be trying to usurp his role.

If that was Google’s intention, Gotlieb did not believe they would succeed. He welcomed Google reaching into the long tail to match advertisers with smaller Web sites. But he did not think Google/DoubleClick could make inroads with brand advertisers, in part because these clients want to be serviced, to have relationships with media agencies they can consult. And he also expressed skepticism that Google would loom as large in the future as it now does. “If you and I were talking about this in 1998, we would have been talking about AOL,” he said. “Two years later we would have been talking about Ask Jeeves.”

IN THE ADVERTISING WORLD, if you say “Irwin,” insiders instantly know whom you mean, just as people in Hollywood know who Warren and Bar bra are without hearing their surnames. In four decades in the advertising business, Irwin Gotlieb has seen fads come and go, though he hasn’t changed his hairstyle (his bouffant, graying mane sits flat atop his head, like the deck of an aircraft carrier) or his attire (dark suits and ties). He is confident that with the largest worldwide market share of media buying-estimated to be 19 percent-GroupM is secure. He disputes the notion that there is a sharp definitional difference between new and old media. “As all media moves to digital delivery,” he said, “the distinction between media types is going to become less relevant, or perhaps irrelevant. Hypothetically, if I’m reading my newspaper on an electronic display and I see a photograph of a touchdown in the Super Bowl and I click on it and get to see a sixty-second video of that touchdown play, am I now reading a newspaper or watching television? Or does the distinction cease to be relevant?” And whether the consumer is leaning forward over a PC, or leaning back to watch TV, or a combination of the two with a mobile device, he believes each medium will be “addressable,” which means his agency will know a lot about that consumer, and each medium will allow the user to click a button for additional information or to make purchases.