14 DAY TRIAL // Google looks pretty determined to win the race in advertising, even if it's running it all by itself. And at the rate it is going for all sorts of partners and acquisitions, the Mountain View-based company may very well be doing just that in a short while. The latest deal it struck is with the Paris-based Publicis Groupe, one of the four largest ad agencies in the world, as "The Wall Street Journal" informs us.
The brands that Publicis has under its tutelage number Saatchi & Saatchi and Leo Burnett among others and, after acquiring back in 2006 the online ad agency Digitas, it expanded its views over the Internet as well. The logical approach for both Google and Publicis if they were to expand into each other's domain was to combine their expertise. Google's know-how for the other's analytical and media planning expertise, as Reuters said.
The two have been cooperating for more than a year, according to the CEOs of the two companies, but just now they decided to make the partnership official. This was possible because, according to Eric Schmidt of Google, his copmpany "will never become an advertising agency" and as such enter on Publicis' turf.
The whole deal should be very worrying for the rivals of the Paris-based partner, like WWP, Omnicom and Interpublic, because it will greatly bolster its position and it will also prove to be the turning point to the market after the DoubleClick acquisition, that Google is close to completing, goes through. It would be the ideal medium and means put together: appealing brand marketing and the wide penetration of the Internet put together. If Microsoft and Yahoo! don't follow quickly in the footsteps of Papa Google, I'm not seeing their future as bright as they hope it to be.