Insider Chatter by Donna Bogatin

Publicis CEO Maurice Levy undoubtedly believes he has obtained a competitive coup in obtaining the friendship of Google CEO Eric Schmidt: In typical Googley “partner” fashion, all hail King Google and its beneficence:

Mr. Levy said the goal is to create a “triple-win” — not just a win-win — situation. “Our clients win, the platform Google wins and the ad industry/Publicis wins. We’re bringing Google our knowledge of advertising communications, consumers and client needs. They’re bringing us knowledge of technology and the world of the web.”

BUT, in REAL typical Google fashion, it is actually $200 billion market cap Google that wins the most.

What is the big, bad Google-Publcis “initiative”?  Google shrewdly continues its worldwide mission of putting the burden of selling more Google ads on other more than willing companies!

Yesterday, Spot Runner. SEE my story: Spot Runner Sells For Rival Google: Local SEM Bandwagon Grows

Today, Publicis, which will be “using Google staff and materials for training programs.” What’s more, Google “has established a dedicated global account team for Publicis Groupe.” YAY? More Google ads for Publicis clients!

Publicis will undoubtedly spin Google ad sales to its accounts by touting a singular, competition trumping, exclusive knowledge of Google AdWords. Savvy Publicis clients, however, will know that Google reveals nothing to anyone–not even resellers–about the black box GOOG fuel that is the pride of Wall Street. After all, Google can only promise “no ceiling to monetization,” if it steadfastly maintains its Google-centric, non-transparent, advertisers always bid up their own rate cards for the greater Google good, AdWords blind auction “democracy” sham.

Savvy search engine advertising agency specialists understand all to well that Google NEVER allows for an actual win-win-win SEM game, as Aaron Goldman, VP, Marketing & Strategic Partnerships, Resolution Media of Omnicom Media, discussed yesterday at the Digital Media Measurement conference in New York City.

Goldman echoed what I have been consistently presenting here at Insider Chatter: Google’s win-win-win spiel is but a convenient user-friendly cover for an impenetrable Google pricing scheme that leaves advertisers in a perpetual Google-centric cloud, fretting over Google’s undecipherable ”quality” calculations and Google’s GOOG monetization comes first blind bidding machinations.

I asked Goldman if advertisers will soon wise up and demand that Google not only treat them with the respect which ought to be due from a media platform soliciting business from them, but also call Google’s “transparency” bluff and allocate their ad dollars elsewhere, unless Google ceases to fuel its oversized proifit margins at the expense of marketers’ and agencies’ own shareholders’ backs.

The Google bandwagon is in no apparent immediate danger.

SEE: Yellow Pages Get Reprieve? The Myth of King Google Local Advertising ROI

MORE: Reach Local Advertising? How Google Squeezes SEMs and AdWords Buyers and
Local Ad Sales War: Why Google is a Guaranteed Winner and
Google AdWords Plus Box: Local CPC Bidding War Unleashed! and
Google Apps & Maps: Enterprise and Local Business STILL Missing and
Local Advertising Online: SMEs Hold the Billion Dollar Keys, ILM ANALYSIS and
Google Zeitgeist: $200 University Payola AdWords Scam and
How Google AdSense FAILS Better Business Bureau and
Frugal Google.org: How NOT To Save the World On $159,000 a Day

PLUS: Facebook To Particls: What IS Your Data Portability End Game?

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN

Spot Runner has acquired GlobeShooter videographers network, continuing to strengthen a portfolio for competing against Google. At the same time, however, Spot Runner is selling up a storm on behalf of arch rival Google.  

Is $200 billion market cap Internet juggernaut Google a direct competitor to startup Spot Runner, a Web-based television advertising production and media buying venture? I asked Nick Grouf, CEO, Spot Runner, just that almost one year ago. Grouf responded with a resounding “You got it.”

I chatted with Grouf on the heels of Google’s public acknowledgement that it is “running a small, early phase trial” of a cable TV ad delivery system last year. The Spot Runner claim to fame is: “the first Internet-based ad agency that makes it easy and affordable for local businesses to advertise on TV.”  Not surprisingly, SpotRunner did not welcome the Google television advertising initiative.

Grouf’s public reaction to the Google announcement of its entry into television advertising was to warn consumers of a nefarious Googleplex:

“Watching people watching TV,” is how Grouf characterized the prospective Google targeted TV advertising platform to me. Google will seek to leverage knowledge of viewership habits, Grouf believes, by using set-top box data collected without explicit consent of subscribers to “target ads according to the viewer.” Google’s end-game? Manipulate viewer data to sell ads at a higher price, Grouf indicated to me.

Interesting then that Grouf’s Spot Runner is now a proud seller of Google products, even as Spot Runner widens its sphere of operations with Google looming ever larger as the key competitor to beat. Spot Runner nevertheless has joined the ever growing ranks of would be Google killers that do their darndest to help Google’s core business grow ever unstoppable!

Spot Runner’s general ambitions are Googley indeed:

Revolutionize the way advertising is created, targeted, bought and sold, focusing on automating many of the more inefficient aspects of the advertising process and creating turnkey ways for busineses of all sizes to access creative and media planning and buying services.

Spot Runner even wants to help with buying Google services! Want a Search Ad with your TV ad?

Let the Spot Runner Search experts focus on the complexities of search advertising so you can focus on running your business.

In other words, let Spot Runner drive more business to Google AdWords! Why not, every one else wants to do it too! SEE: Yellow Pages Get Reprieve? The Myth of King Google Local Advertising ROI

MORE: Reach Local Advertising? How Google Squeezes SEMs and AdWords Buyers and
Local Ad Sales War: Why Google is a Guaranteed Winner and
Google AdWords Plus Box: Local CPC Bidding War Unleashed! and
Google Apps & Maps: Enterprise and Local Business STILL Missing and
Local Advertising Online: SMEs Hold the Billion Dollar Keys, ILM ANALYSIS and
Google Zeitgeist: $200 University Payola AdWords Scam and
How Google AdSense FAILS Better Business Bureau and
Frugal Google.org: How NOT To Save the World On $159,000 a Day

ALSO: Why Zynga, NOT Scrabulous, Has a Lucky Facebook Charm

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN

eMarketer discusses “hidden trends of 2008,” while offering proprietary data.

What happens when the self-declared “leading provider of strategic research and analysis, data and competitive metrics on Yellow Pages,” starts the new year by issuing a Press Release hailing “a profound shift” in print Yellow Pages spend without providing data to back up the provocative “prediction”?

Media reaction to the Kelsey Group’s formal announcement of its analysts’ educated guesses for 2008 could be 1) Discussion of anecdotal insights, 2) Dismissal of unsubstantiated projections, 3) Request for Kelsey clarification or 4) Unquestioning acceptance of New Year musings as fact.

Here at Insider Chatter, I proceeded with reaction number three: I immediately asked Kelsey to “explain/expound/backup” its cavalier, unsubstaniated “prediction” of “big increases in local search inventory.”

In typical blogosphere fashion, however, a typical media reaction was to pounce on another opportunity to giddily regurgitate a trendy ”Yellow Pages are toast” meme. So much so, apparently, that Kelsey itself deemed it prudent to issue its version of a Yellow Pages clarification.

I look forward to Kelsey’s “clarification” of its far reaching local search “prediction.”

The questions that I pose in response to Kelsey’s declaration that “big increases in local search inventory” are on the 2008 horizon are: Why “big increases”? How “big increases”? Where “big increases”? Who benefits from the “big increases”? Does any data back up the specific prediction, or is it a gut call?

For now, Kelsey advises it is “in the process of updating its annual revenue and usage forecast for global Yellow Pages and local search, which will project out five years.”

YAY? NO! Kelsey will “release the document” to “TKG clients in mid first quarter,” signaling “at which time our forecast figures will be subject to debate and scrutiny.”

Not really. The local world at large will apparently have to continue to deal with ambiguous Kelsey press releases.

UPDATE: Recession Hits AT&T Online: Kelsey Local Search Advertising Predictions Too? and Yellow Pages Get Reprieve? The Myth of King Google Local Advertising ROI

MORE: Reach Local Advertising? How Google Squeezes SEMs and AdWords Buyers and
Yellow Pages Trash Talking: The SEO Dog in the Google Local Fight and
Google AdWords Plus Box: Local CPC Bidding War Unleashed! and
Google Apps & Maps: Enterprise and Local Business STILL Missing and
Local Advertising Online: SMEs Hold the Billion Dollar Keys, ILM ANALYSIS 
Google Beware: Facebook Takes Local Advertising Gloves Off, ILM REPORT and
Judy’s Book: What’s On Sale? WE ARE! Ten Reasons Why

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN

Is Local.com crying that Localsearch.com is now in the hands of Verizon Superpages.com fueled Idearc Media?

Local.com may be the company laughing! After all, the 2005 $700,000 local.com URL purchase looks like a bargain in relation to today’s $3 million plus resale of the more convoluted LocalSearch.com.

What is the biggest domain joke of all? Acquiring either Local.com or LocalSearch.com domains is no guaranteed direct navigation business development feat in and of itself, as Local.com can attest to.

After all, how has Local.com competed against the major search engines for local searchers? By buying high-priced search engine keyword advertising!

ALSO: Google’s $10 Local Search Pipe Dream: Slave Wages to Squeeze Yellow Pages and
Google Local Search Gold Mine: When Does Google Cash In? and
1-800 Pay-Per-Call: Marchex Buys VoiceStar, $4 billion Local Advertising Bonanza?

PLUS: Digg Proves WHY Digg Headlines Are NOT ‘Real’ News

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN

Google News is a joke: Shelby Bonnie, former CNET CEO, suggested as much at the NYC MIXX conference last year. With a nod to fellow panelist Tim Armstrong, Google VP Ad Sales, Bonnie underscored the uselessness of listing dozens of versions of the “same AP story,” as Google News does.

Algorithmic filtering and machine ranking can not subsititute for editorial judgement in identifying and prioritizing content, Bonnie indicated. Moreover, seeing the handful of stories that “people are actually doing the work on” ought to be the norm, Bonnie asserted.

Can Google News get its editorial act together? The Los Angeles Times does not believe so, headling an editorial on Google News: “It’s not journalism.”

Does the USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review want the LA Times to shut up about Google?

Should the Times apologize to Google for pointing out that “journalism is more than just aggregating information”? The blogosphere undoubetdly thinks so.

After all, Dave Winer admonished Jason Calacanis that HE should apologize to Google for pointing out that Google SERPs are not pristine. Winer even scripted a handy mea culpa for Calacanis to submit to Google:

To our friends at Google. I’d like to apologize for saying that your search engine is filled with spam.

“Our friends” at Google? The shrewd, secretive $160 billion market cap Google with a determined manifest destiny to obtain, control and house all the public, private and personal data in the world, belonging to every man, woman and organization on the planet, in its “massively, scalable infrastrucure” in the cloud? THOSE Google “friends”?

Why is the Web’s monopolist acting powerhouse welcomed as a personal friend, while desktop monopolizing Microsoft is reviled as a direct enemy? Because Google is seen as a new age Santa Clause, a beneficent SERP fountain of the almighty “flow” and a turnkey AdSense monetization spigot.

Google “friendship” is a dangerous illusion, though. From dreams of “free, organic” traffic to calculations of super sized AdWords and AdSense ROI, the Web’s Google dependency fuels a ballooning GOOG while robbing Web publishers of their independent, stand alone economic futures.

The L.A. Times actually case in point. For all their independent who needs Google “sound and fury,” Times’ journalists are very conventionally Google dependendent as well.

ALSO: Does USC Annenberg OJR Want Old Media Journalists to Shut Up?

The Web’s fuel–Ads by Google–is funding the L.A. Times “It’s not journalism” opinion.

PLUS: Google Office Ignores Sun StarOffice: Microsoft Killer Still MIA and Google vs. Facebook, the Next Big Battle

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN

In announcing its new Travel Destination Shortcut, Yahoo wistfully calls “Time to hit the beaches.”

Really? Yahoo’s search marketers are the ones being hit!

Hearalded as making the vacation planning process “that much easier,” the new Yahoo SERP feature puts Yahoo’s own Travel Channel up front and center stage for any and all Yahoo users searching for travel information.

What Yahoo travel searcher could possibly miss the oversized, in full living color, one-stop box pitching the travel.yahoo.com visitor guide?

Not only does the BIG Yahoo self-promo supercede the supposedly most relevant Web pages fo the topic at hand, it overshadows Yahoo’s paid “Sponsor Results” customers as well:

Hotels.com
Travelocity
Amazon.com/books
Holiday Inn
Singapore Air….

How will Yahoo search advertisers in the travel sector be impacted as Yahoo is now more directly competing against them? Lower clicktroughs? Hiigher bids required to guarantee placement?

The Yahoo Travel Channel that Yahoo’s new travel search “shortcut” leads to leads to more Yahoo paid links, “Sponsored Deals.” Will Yahoo search marketers need to up their spend in Yahoo’s travel channel to recoup lost clicks from Yahoo SERPs?

Once again, Yahoo is following in Google’s search footsteps; This time, in terms of big, bad coopetition.

ALSO: Twitter This: Google AdSense is NOT a Business Model! and Autonomy vs. Google Search Appliance? No Contest: Google Enterprise Gets Defensive

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN