Ad Industry Coopetition

There is a really good piece by Joe Marchese up on MediaPost. The thesis is that Google is delivering transparency and accountability to advertisers that heretofor have been missing from the services delivered to advertisers by traditional ad agencies. We've written a bit about this from time-to-time on this blog. See here, here, and here. Suffice to say, we firmly believe that advertising is heading in the direction of greater transparency and accountability. Given the entrenched business models and compensation structures, that's a transition that's easier said than done for many large advertising and pr agencies. Value chains are being remade to leverage the data and information that is now available to customers and producers. The benefits of the availability of this information are flowing directly to the producers and customers. The traditional service providers (distribution, pr, advertising, retail, etc.) in the middle are getting squeezed bigtime.