For $10.5 billion you can rule the world part 2

In part 1 of "For $10.5 billion you can rule the world" I talked about the impact on the online trave industry of Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL and WPP undertaking a combined $10.5 billion acquisition spree in online advertising. At the end of the post I reach out to online marketing guru Mike Potts of e-interactive to hear his thoughts. has sent through some comments in the new part 2 of this article here. As part 2 in this story here is what Mike has to say...

Google is the “superpower” and looks to remain that way in the mid-term at least. Looking at the online marketing results of my travel clients who are spreading marketing spend across a few important media, Google PPC wins hands down from an ROI perspective. Add to this the ease of managing the campaigns from both an agency and in-house perspective, and the ease of integration of Adwords into Google Analytics, and the combination is all but astonishing.

The major impact for all industries - travel included - is that it should bring more powerful marketing tools to the market for everyone to use.

Google seems to repeating patterns of old, and everyone else is just playing catch-up:

• Google Step 1 - build in-house solution, or acquire a bad one and release an “okay” product; and
  
• Google Step 2 - figure out what the market really needs and go and buy someone else to support that.

There a now three clear examples of this strategy at Google:

• Google video followed by the acquisition of Youtube (so far a pure media land-grab rather than tech acquisition perhaps)
• Acquisition of Urchin which became Google Analytics V1, following by the acquisition of MeasureMap which became the awesome Google Analytics V2 (or perhaps V1 squared)
• Google Adsense followed by the DoubleClick deal (or perhaps Adsense squared)

As far as Google is concerned it continues to make previously high end technology and media space available to many more smaller companies and I wouldn’t be surprised to see this repeated with DoubleClick’s ad serving and tracking technology. Imagine, for instance, that a small online travel agent could judge Adwords ROI or earn money from Adsense on the basis of ads SEEN (and not clicked) but where that user still made a purchase later (TV style). The “view based” advert ROI metric is well used by DoubeClick as a way of realizing value from ad campaigns.

On a practical level, my travel clients are desperately trying to find ways of finding new users for their sites (outside of Google), and these acquisitions should make entities like RealMedia and aQuantive (and their media placements/markets/technology) more readily available to smaller businesses. Lets hope the ROI’s lives up to Google levels.