Sandlines

JY in happier days (this January!)

Jerry Yang is taking time out from his Microsoft flip-flopping and Google adventures to visit London. He’s been speaking today at the IAB Engage conference here. Unsurprisingly he takes the view that the current recession is going to make ‘digital’ stronger.

Sandlines agrees whole-heartedly – and I’ve been saying this for some time now.

However, I can’t help but thing it will finish Yahoo! – or at least Yang’s stewardship of the once-mighty purple monster – once and for all.

What price the offer Microsoft made earlier this year? It was $35 a share. That looked rich in the spring, but now Yahoo is trading at a few cents over $10.

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Breaking up?

I’ve borrowed the Ya-Who bit from AdViking… as mentioned over there (and a few other places!) the collapse of the Google/Yahoo! partnership bodes ill for the latter’s long term survival. I wonder if they’ll still be there in 5 years time.

Sandlines can’t help but wonder if Google entered the discussions in similar tone to how they entered the bidding for a wireless spectrum licence earlier this year. In Planet Google, Stross notes that a Google manager described his team’s anxiety that they might win, after placing the $4.71 billion bid: “We kept hitting the ‘refresh’ button on the browser to see if other companies had bid higher…”

Might Google have entered the deal feeling – “If it goes through, great, if it doesn’t: even better”. It certainly broke up the Microsoft / Yahoo! party and leaves Yahoo! needing a white knight. It will be interesting to see if Steve Ballmer still wants to play. If he does, it would speak to Microsoft’s despair in the battle against Google.

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Over on Razorshine, my old pal Kanani has been shopping – in the real world – and hoping that Google would help him. As the organisation dedicated to ‘…organi(sing) the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” this is perhaps not an unreasonable expectation. Especially when, as Riaz says, the new Westfield Shopping Centre has linked to Google Maps to show us how to find them. Ah well.

It raises a question that someone asked me a couple of weeks ago over a pint – and which has come up several times recently: is it possible to go up against Google and win?

Privately, many inside Microsoft would say that perhaps it isn’t – at least for Microsoft.

So if you’re going into business doing anything around the ‘organisation’ and provision of information, does that mean you should pack up and go home?

No.

Google does an outstanding job most of the time – but they are not perfect, or infallible. And, for all their 16,000+ employees, they still cannot do everything. At least, not all right now. Pick the right one of those areas and you’re in business… perhaps.

Then there’s the new semantic search technologies that are touted as the foundation of a ‘web 3.0′ world. Google, of course, will play in this sandpit, but it’s a different approach to presenting information than that which is hard coded into Google’s corporate psyche, so the jury is not quite in yet as to whether they’ll rise to the challenge.

Of course, there is also the entire ecosystem that has sprung up around the way Google makes money. One friend of mine calls this ‘feeding the monster’. Shopping comparison and much affiliate marketing could be described as falling into this bucket. And it’s a healthy one, even in a downturn.

But one of the more interesting perspectives is coming from a book I’m reading at the moment – Randall Stoss has published a near-insider’s view of Google in ‘Planet Google: One Company’s Audacious Plan to Organize Everything We Know” ( I link to the ebook, but you can get it on Amazon too). And it’s a compelling view. Doubtless I will mention it again over the coming days.

It’s curious in how it compares Google’s ‘open’ view of the world with the essentially closed environment that social networking (well, mainly Facebook) is once again introducing to the web.

Just as Google wins the legal battle to index the content of pretty much any published book it likes – and extend beyond the virtual world – it’s curious that its biggest threat may well come from the web itself. Food for thought.

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My fellow AdVikings wrote a few days ago about the great MS launching their defense of the display advertising model. Unsurprising bit of timing: just as recession bites, and marketers flee from the gloss of ‘brand building’ in favour of actually closing business.

Is it a dog? Is it a shame? No, it's G1

Of course, as AdViking points out, the whole point of brand building was supposed to be about closing sales as well. And therefore I find it hard to disagree MS and their attempts to map the various touch points between the brand and the consumer in an attempt to allocate values to the various touchpoints.

But – and it’s a decent sized but – let’s not forget that marketing is an unholy balance between art and science… the numbers alone don’t tell the full story.

So, if you consider that T-Mobile’s current advertising campaign:

• their radio spots are (to these ears at least) a major disincentive to buy from them (hate them!)
• poster treatments work substantially better

Now I happen to be interested in getting the new G1 Android phone, which is only available from T-Mobile. (OK – I know it’s ugly, but this is an illustration, work with me here). The negative impact of the radio advertising is cancelled out by other things. But is there any way Microsoft’s Engagement Mapping can measure that successfully? Or, by buying a G1, do I tell the marketers that their awful radio ads had the desired affect?

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