Today’s announcement by Google and French global advertising mega-agency Publicis of a partnership to automate the creative aspects of online advertising is interesting to put it mildly. If I were in the traditional agency business (and I have been) I’d be very very nervous.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt offered up the possibility of this partnership creating something called ‘open source advertising’ which I assume means that they will look into developing automated ways of developing effective creative and brand positioning on the web. If this is possible (and I imagine that this partnership is more about finding that out than someone already figuring it out) then the typical agency creative team will be marginalized when it comes to Internet Marketing. Ordinarily one might think this was bad except that the typical agency creative team has already marginalized themselves by pretending that online marketing was some kind of novelty item that was beneath the interest of the brand mavens.
Imagine a scenario where a mom and pop business wants to get the most out of their limited marketing budgets. Because they can’t afford agency rates and their tendency to overspend, these businesses typically let ad sales reps in the local media choose their buys, create their ads and manage their campaigns, for ‘free’ of course. This was the business equivalent of letting the fox manage the chicken coop. Junky ads, lousy positioning, budgets spent with no measurable return and the consequent belief that ‘advertising’ doesn’t work.
Now imagine a dead simple Google process for that business, one that automates keyword selection, creates ads, targets geographically, demographically and by price, all automatically and a system that returns a specific report on ROI, daily. I think our Mom and Pop business owner would dig that (and that growth business owner and those corporate shareholders…).
These guys could own advertising as we know it and as it will become- I’m watching and wondering…an open source marketing network?