Talking about Google rebates in Marketing Week
I was contacted by Marketing Week for my opinion on the impact of Google announcing that it is to withdraw rebates to agencies (which skew the market in favour of larger advertisers, in my opinion - at least when they are only available above a certain spend).
The resulting article is now on the Marketing Week website and also in the print version published this week. I don’t say anything too stupid (I hope) - mainly sticking up for the little guy and showing my free market credentials:
Markets including those for online advertising should be as open and transparent as possible and I would support a move towards even greater transparency.
[Update January 2008: Marketing Week have kindly moved this behind their paid-content barrier, so the link above will only work if you are a subscriber to Marketing Week]
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David Mihm on Fri (2 Nov) @ 3:50 pm
Nice, Will, congrats on the pub! It’s always nice to see Google looking out for the little guy, but I’m not sure that it’ll make a huge difference in where they’re positioned; 8% isn’t likely to scale back too many marketing budgets at big companies, is it?
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Will Critchlow on Fri (2 Nov) @ 4:59 pm
Well, it depends how you look at it. That 8% effectively means the big guys could have a conversion rate quite significantly worse and still make money so they could afford to pay more per click.
It’s less about total budget concerns and more about how the little guy can compete for each click when they are at a disadvantage on the CPC.
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David Mihm on Fri (2 Nov) @ 10:14 pm
Good point, I hadn’t thought about the conversion side of it. On tight-margin items (or services), 8% probably eats up a significant chunk of the profit!