Merger Mysteries

There is one thing that I'm struggling to understand about the various recent M&A activity in Webland. I can't, unfortunately, claim to know much about the technologies, the long range plans of Microsoft or Google, or valuing companies for that matter. Nor have I devoted much time to following the recent developments. The angle that I'm struggling with, however, is the importance that the acquisitors (Google particularly) and commentators have placed on ad serving technology.

Over the last couple of years I have had dozens of conversations with colleagues in markets around Europe where I have argued the point for moving to Doubleclick and away from their local preference for consistency across the agency network. I've come across ad serving technologies developed in Sweden, Poland, Russia, the Czech Republic and Australia that have dedicated followers arguing their benefits over Doubleclick. This leads me to infer two things. Firstly, Doubleclick has, quite sensibly, not prioritised having people on the ground in the smallest markets. Secondly, ad serving really is not that complicated.

I'm not saying that I could develop an adserving platform but it seems to me that rumbling Google cynicism will open the door for the growth of smaller adserving platforms. It wasn't that long ago, for instance, that I was convinced that makers of analytics tools would extend into adserving. From an advertiser point of view this would make significantly more sense than Doubleclick and publishers are unlikely to complain.