Google Offloads Search-Marketing Business to Publicis

Google Offloads Search-Marketing Business to Publicis

By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD

Google said Wednesday that it had found a willing buyer for its Performics search-marketing unit: Publicis Groupe, the giant French advertising holding company.

Performics had been owned by DoubleClick, and ever since Google’s acquisition of that company closed, Google has been expected to unload Performics. The conflict of interest is pretty clear, given that Performics advises clients on how to maximize their visibility on Google. Google itself said as much back in April.

Publicis, meanwhile, has been trying to strengthen its digital offerings. The company, which owns ad agencies including Leo Burnett and Saatchi & Saatchi — and thus handles work for clients like Visa and General Motors — recently reorganized. This was meant to help its four media-buying agencies offer clients more scale for digital ad placements, to allow the company to begin work on ad-exchange strategies, and to help it train its staff better in digital technologies.

Google’s Ad Network, Now With Double the Cookies

As part of the ongoing integration of its DoubleClick acquisition (yesterday it got sold off Proximic), Google will be placing an additional DoubleClick cookie on the browsers of everyone who visits a site that is part of Google’s current AdSense network. This will allow Google to serve up display ads across that network of sites. It will also allow it to introduce some basic improvements such as frequency capping (letting advertisers limit how many times the same person sees the same ad), and better reporting and conversion data.

All of that is great for advertisers and great for Google, which will be able to leverage its vast, existing Adsense network to push display ads as well. This is what scares the hell out of Microsoft and Yahoo, and was the prime impetus for Microsoft seriously getting into the online ad business in the first place with its acquisition of aQuantive last year and its attempts to buy Yahoo this year.

For consumers, it means even more cookies on their browsers and more attempts to target ads to them. From the Google Blog:

We are enabling this functionality by implementing a DoubleClick ad-serving cookie across the Google content network. Using the DoubleClick cookie means that DoubleClick advertisers and publishers don’t have to make any changes on their websites as we continue our integration efforts and offer additional enhancements.

On the bright side, for those who of you who have enough cookies on your browser, Google is letting you opt out of cookies for both AdSense and DoubleClick ads with one click...