Google’s road to online display advertising

Since Google announced their ‘intention of purchase’ of DoubleClick in April of 2007, CEO Eric Schmidt has been talking about display advertising with great ambition. As he said in the press release following the ‘07 announcement, he believed the DoubleClick acquisition was going to ’accelerate the adoption of Google's innovative advances in display advertising’.

The purchase went through in November 2008, in the press release of which, Schmidt said that ‘DoubleClick gives Google the leading platform for display advertising, enabling [them] to rapidly bring advances to the market in technology and infrastructure that will dramatically improve the effectiveness, measurability and performance of digital media for publishers, advertisers and agencies. In addition he mentioned that ‘the combination of Google and DoubleClick [will] deliver better, more relevant display ads’.

And only last year, at the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference in March 2009 CNN quoted him saying that they are in the process of building an ad exchange that will ‘apply the Google magic’ to placing display advertising online. (additional source Techpulse)

And since Schmidt has implied on many occasion before that display advertising is their next billion dollar business, it’s no surprise that a couple of days ago (February 2010) Google appointed Barry Salzman as Head of Media Platform (including display), who is all about efficiency.

More on that later...
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