From a recent Times piece on Publicis, a major ad agency:
“I think Google has overextended, like Napoleon opening up a Russian front,” [said Rishad Tobaccowala, a top executive in the media-buying division of Publicis] last week in an interview in London. “I think they are a very amazing company that will take over nothing.”
Tobaccowala is heading up a new think tank at Publicis “to spot new media and marketing technologies on behalf of clients.”
Google trotted out Tobaccowala at last year’s AdTech San Francisco to laud the successful launch of their CPM product (site targeting) and encourage other agencies to jump on the Google CPM bandwagon. From what I can tell, this hasn’t been a big success. I guess the relationship between Rishad and Google has soured since then . . .
In france we like google
there is so much spend moving this (interactive) direction, Tobaccowala’s quote will sound like the last bray of dying plesteisaurus if Publicis doesn’t have an answer for Google
Google supremacy
It’s bizarre that with all recent years peer to peer technology advance, Gnutella, file downloading and non stop ADSL connection, that no one had proposed a software or a web browser add-on that index all html page fetched from the web within each particular user PC.
Something as a desk top search engine for html pages. That allow not only to search pages downloaded on your local pc but also to all pc where the same software is installed. Result sorted by IP address, pages duplicated and keyword index updated.
Such a software while automatically keeping multiple copies of retrieved pages, make WEB servers useless as each participating pc became a redundant server.
Google indexing the WEB had a price more than 100.000 pc’s interconnected in farms and of course a huge cost and web scan still take weeks.
In conclusion, giants fondations are always week…
My experience has been that Publicis is almost comically behind the curve in thinking about interactive advertising. The executives in charge of M&A / corp dev there categorically do not understand how SEM / SEO work, how ads are priced and why advertisers might want to pay on a CPA (as opposed to page views) basis.
It seems inconceivable to me that a group of “futurists” sitting around in Paris debating new technologies will be able to be “bomb throwers”. Without an M&A budget or an innovative team, they’re just whispering in the wind.
You forgot the last part –
Tobaccowala is heading up a new think tank at Publicis “to spot new media and marketing technologies on behalf of clients” and charge them an arm and a leg for the service.
Why does Google _need_ to take over anything? Can’t companies just be good at what they do? It seems to me that the market puts unreasonable strain on companies to constantly grow. What happened to the notion of a competitive market with many players? Choice is important.
Paul: There are people out there who have definitely been thinking about peer-to-peer text information retrieval, as you have proposed.
John, what is your feed-back on the GOOG analyst day of yesterday ?
John, do you have an opinion on these comments? Tobaccowala has amassed an impressive group of ad professionals for Publicis’ new venture, Denuo and I’ve heard a lot of praise of him in particular.