Plans For Google’s Future Vision Revealed

In yesterday’s Sunday Times, Omid Kordestani, Google’s senior VP for global sales and business development, outlined the company’s vision for expansion, which could in theory signal the death knell for agencies.

The company’s primary revenue driver is the success of search based advertising, which generated the majority of its $10.6 billion last year.

However, Kordestani said that key-word advertising was only the start, and that the company planned to apply the same data-driven approach to other forms of advertising, such as TV, print, radio and emerging technologies like mobile phones.

“The effectiveness and accountability [of search] can extend to all these new areas,” he said. “There’s not a lot of spending in other segments, but there is a great desire among customers to have the same view into the performance of this advertising, and be able to understand how best to allocate budgets between the different formats.”

He continued: “It’s about efficiency and accountability. The ultimate vision is [to create] a dashboard that helps chief marketing officers to have real visibility of how best to spend and allocate their budgets. There’s a lot of power in that.”

Google is moving away from pure search into display following its acquisition of video sharing site YouTube (see Google Buys YouTube), and the purchase of DoubleClick, which develops and provides internet ad serving services.

Google has also recently signed a multi-year agreement with Clear Channel which enables the search engine giant to sell a guaranteed portion of 30-second advertising inventory available on more that 675 of Clear Channel’s AM/FM stations across the US.

Today sees Zeitgeist, Google’s annual gathering to discuss technology trends with industry leaders. Joining the search giant’s team will be the likes of WPP’s Sir Martin Sorrell, BSkyB’s James Murdoch and the BBC’s Mark Thompson.

As Google seems to succeed at everything it puts its hand to, this new future vision could cause many of these company chiefs, not to mention ad agencies, considerable concern. But is Google really set to swallow other major players with its new vision of expansion, or is it time for companies to keep their ‘frenemies’ close (see Ovum Analyst Discusses The Future Of Google)?

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