Musings from GroupM: The Dirtiest Four-Letter Word in Digital Advertising - Chris Copeland - MediaBizBloggers

The late, great comedian George Carlin once joked about the seven words you couldn't say on television. The full bit is found here (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_Nrp7cj_tM), but it's an interesting contrast to what has become the dirtiest word in digital advertising. Just four letters have become the central conflict in the digital landscape. That naughty word? OPEN.

Every battle taking place today from data ownership to ad serving to concept development and distribution hinges on the view companies are taking around the notion of open. Let's take a look at the convenient usage of open the biggest players in digital are using when it serves them and how open gets shut when it's an inconvenient truth for their own business model.

Starting with the original champion of open – Google. Google has open social, their open handset approach and the Android platform, and their fundamental belief that open is the way toward light in everything, or so it seems. In the time since I started writing this post, Google launched the WebM project (http://www.webmproject.org/) which is all about open web media (video and audio) for everyone. In fact, Google has been quoted as saying that when contrasting to the approach of Apple, their view is better because it serves the greater good. Mario Queiroz, vice president of product management for Google, said as much on The Official Google Blog (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/our-new-approach-to-buying-mobile-phone.html) in January when he posted, "Android was developed with one simple idea: open up mobile devices to enable greater innovation that will benefit users everywhere."

Yet, for all the openness that Google presents, they continue to fail to deliver an open search platform. Their search platform, built on optimum user experience, continues to fail to enable third-party ad serving which would allow better messaging and frequency capping to ensure users get the right connection and are limited from over exposure to the same ads that are failing to connect. I've written about this at length before (http://www.searchfuel.com/2010/04/be-not-afraid-of-greatness-the-search-aspirations-of-yahoo-and-bing/) but suffice it to say that when your market share is flattening in your dominant cash stream source, the ability to provide advertisers with more intelligent forms of targeting, which may not produce revenue, likely doesn't hit the list of key initiatives. And that is a shame because under their open, best experience mantra, access to improved targeting absolutely should.

To go further into the Google wheelhouse and their disconnect of ‘do as I say when I'm not the dominant player, not as I do when I call the shots,’ is the recent roll out of Search Funnels. Designed as a means to show better upper-funnel engagement to lower-funnel conversation and, consequently, encourage more spend, the Search Funnels tool falls woefully short of being a true, open view of what's happening. Any attribution model that does not allow third-party serving in search tilts all models again away from search and to display where not only is click-through measured, but view-through and impression-level intelligence are also measured.

That being said, the effort Google is making to be open in other areas, while arguably self-serving in many ways, does stand in stark contrast to the behavior that their chief rivals are engaged in presently. In the take the ball and go home club, Apple and Facebook continue to cement their status as kingpins.

If you look at the mobile space, Apple has clearly decided that the closed platform that is iPhone app development is in their best interest. Even complicating matters further are the comments made by Steve Jobs in launching the iAd. Speaking to a home crowd audience, Jobs said, "If you look at advertisements on a phone, it’s not like on a desktop. On a desktop, it’s about search. On mobile, search hasn’t happened. People aren’t searching on their phones. People are spending their time in apps." Then, only a few weeks later, Apple purchased Siri, a mobile search assistance company, going back into the very space Jobs had decried to serve Apple interests. It's clear that as the shift from desktop to mobile progresses and Apple looks for direct revenue sources, the development opportunities are open but only to those who want to play by the house rules set in Cupertino. Just ask Adobe about their stance on open as it pertains to Apple, or read about it here (http://www.adobe.com/choice/).

This similar approach holds true at Facebook where the only things open these days in the Facebook strategy are the privacy holes you can run a truck through. If you are an advertiser looking to invest within the 500 million user base, you are welcomed with open arms; but try to track back and measure via third-party technologies and you will find a closer door. No one can say for sure yet what the 500 million Friends are worth – or much else for that matter in the social space today. But what is clear is that Facebook seems fixed on keeping that intention data inside their walls and setting market prices based on their interpretation of the data, more so than what advertisers are able to derive.

It's a convenient approach in the digital world to decry business practices that close opportunity to companies in order to serve one’s own interest. That's capitalism and not soon to change. It is also convenient for a dominant player to critique others for the business decision to not be open when they themselves make a conscientious decision to hold their most valuable and profitable asset close to their vest. What is trouble in these cases are the interdependencies advertisers have on the search, mobile and social channels and the data they can provide to better connect with consumers. If everyone chooses when to be open and is oppressively selective in when not to be, then what you'll find are more and more advertisers unwilling to open their wallets.

Chris Copeland is CEO of GroupM Search for the Americas. Chris can be reached at chris.copeland@groupm. You can also follow Chris on Twitter @SearchBoss.

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