DaxThink: Digital life

Everyone has an opinion on Google - mine is that they are a great company and I love and use the majority of their products.

They have enjoyed sustained growth for a number of years, but there are signs that this is beginning to falter. This is not a surprise, every business or industry will plateau at some stage, but the pressures of being a public company will drive them to fight the plateau.

There have been several announcements from the Great G that indicate this is already happening and it will likely to be to the detriment of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). These include secondary search boxes and the addition of video into the paid search listings.

One of Google's winning features is its simple interface, Will the drive to generate ever increasing revenues lead to a cluttering of the page with more and more complex ad units. I suspect it will.

Consider this - will the Google SERP ever carry a banner?

As an agency with its roots in search, we are very aware of the capabilities of the major engines across all aspects of search but also their growing offerings in display. In fact, we have tremendous success by buying on a CPC basis through Google for our clients, especially in North America.

There is an ongoing discussion within the industry and within our agency as to the direction media buying will take.

On one hand, the growth of Google et al in this sector is likely to increase CPC and even CPA traffic, something that will happen exponentially with the acquisition of DoubleClick and the launch of Google Ad Manager.

However, from another perspective, 'good' publishers are in a position of strength and can choose the way in which they sell the first 60-80% of their inventory. What they do with the remaining 20-40% is up to them, but we don't necessarily want to focus on buying this remnant inventory anyway.

Last week though a major publisher took a big step in one of these directions; ESPN.com has announced it is cancelling its arrangements with its media house and also the ad networks it does business with. Instead they are moving more to a direct model selling what is likely to be more premium custom packages.

Google et al will continue to grow in this sector, but if publishers like this decide not to fuel the ad networks growth then we won't be seeing an entire CPC marketplace anytime soon.

And it makes sense for publishers to do this. They own the product and if ad networks continue to grow they will hold too much of the power and could lower the overall effective CPM rate that a publisher can achieve.

A bit of an odd one, but a thought that came to mind this evening - probably the Port!

I studied Biology at University and the subjects that were of most interest were evolution and genetic science. Ever since, I have maintained an amateur level of interest in the theories of natural selection and emergence. Follow this by a discussion in our house about the extremes that humans can survive within, from minus 30 Celsius in a South Pole weather station, to plus 50 Celsius at many parts of the equator; evolution and adaption through natural selection makes this possible.

So consider what would happen if you took a modern human out of the environment that they are comfortable within and dropped them into somewhere hostile. For instance, how long would I personally survive within the jungle on my own? I would like to think I could, but in reality I probably wouldn't for too long.

But, what happens if you dropped someone into a new environment with a laptop, power and a connection? They could find out what to eat, how to build a shelter, what animals were poisonous; in fact everything they would need to survive!

There was an argument made during my studies by Steve Jones at University college London that humans in the West have stopped evolving and instead we force the environment around us to evolve to our requirements. Could it be that the Internet helps us transcend environment and bypasses the need for evolution in the way Steve described?

(One I forgot to post...)

Last night Britain experienced its strongest earthquake for 25 years. Nothing to get too excited about in comparison to the experiences other countries have, measuring a quite small 5.2 on the Richter Scale.

My usual source of news is the Sky News website, and they have done a great job over the last 18 months of encouraging uses to submit their own photos, comments and video. There was one comment though that surprised me:

"Within a few minutes, viewers were emailing Sky News Online to tell how their homes had been shaken and uploading their comments and pictures."

There is no question that our behaviour has changed as the generation of content by the user (and its subsequent publication) has become more popular, and there is definitely a human trait that means we love sharing with each other.

Interesting anthropological moment though to observe that we have reached the point where one of the first things we do after an earthquake is email or text a news website

In a recent ZDNet article there is a discussion on the Google announcement that there has been an acceleration of mobile Internet activity, heralding the era of the mobile has finally arrived.

As an agency we must be very careful with definitions and expectations when we talk to our clients to avoid confusion. What the industry has been waiting for is an increase in mobile phones accessing typically WAP pages on the go. Whilst this seems to be increasing I believe that it will be overtaken by 'Internet on the go' before it becomes really established.

The arrival of the iPhone that browses real web pages and the significant increase in 3G data cards for laptops means that there will be more access whilst away from the home or the office but it is likely to be of full experience 'real' web pages, not of WAP pages, and hence not within the perception of what mobile Internet means.

One of the last differences between a mobile phone (including the iPhone) and Internet on the go through a laptop is that mobile devices still lack the ability to render Flash content. This is being addressed, and once complete, it could be argued that the chapter of 'Mobile Internet' will be closed and we will have moved firmly into the chapter of 'Internet on the go'.

We will be asked to engage in mobile more and more for our clients and must take this into account.

RIP Wap.

Have Google just made another industry changing move?

Shortly after the announcement of the DoubleClick deal being closed we see Google Ad Manager coming out in beta - a free publisher ad-serving tool.

Many seem worried about the potential risk this poses to a publisher; too many eggs in one basket, Google having access to too much data, or the possibility of having their ad revenues marginalised. These debates will continue and only time will tell.

However, I am excited about being able to use such a large publisher network in the future. We have already had a lot of success on our media plans by exploring the Google content network on a CPC basis, and I look forward to it becoming an even richer source of sites.

DoubleClick already has a fair chunk of the World's biggest sites through DFP, and Google is great at placing advertising on the average smaller website (and yes, they do the big ones too), but combine them and you have awesome power.

Free ad-servers aren't new, OpenX has been in this market for a while, but Google coming into this market with a DFP-style product is a different story.

Will it bankrupt other publisher ad-servers? No, just as the acquisition of Urchin and the subsequent roll-out of Google Analytics didn't bankrupt Omniture.

And then of course there is the DoubleClick Ad Exchange. I am not a fan yet - there is no agency commission and every impression is an auction opening up risk to running out of frequency within a budget - but the potential from 2 industry powerhouses coming together is definitely there.