Google is Growing Too Fast and Here’s Why

I recently had a conversation with a friend and publishing executive who’s paying a nice chunk of change for an online advertising sales rep with four years of experience. My comment to him, “I bet you never thought you would pay that type of money for someone with only four years of experience at anything.” Not suprisingly, his reply was, “No kidding!”If you regularly talk to traditional print ad sales reps or negotiate with junior planners at advertising agencies, you know that anyone with quality experience selling (or buying) online advertising is worth a lot. Thanks to Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick, I’ve learned that the king of pay-per-click advertising and search apparently has taken a step backward in what it knows about online advertising, or at least what it knows about its customers.We get a fair amount of RFPs through DoubleClick Site Directory. I read through all of them and handle each one with care. One of the latest came from a company called Traffic Tactics.The company’s owners are Carlos and Lupe Garcia, self-proclaimed Internet marketers who morphed into this business by earning millions of dollars selling illegal analog cable descramblers and then even more money from a weight-loss program that ended up getting shut down by the FTC’s ”Operation Big Fat Lie.” They’re now using Site Directory in an attempt to find large amounts of remnant ad space and will serve advertising using DoubleClick’s (Google’s) DART ad server.The Traffic Tactics’ campaign objectives are to achieve a $10 CPA (Cost Per Action/Acquisition) by driving people to a landing page that collects a name, e-mail address and phone number in exchange for... well, I really don’t know. While visitors try to figure everything out, they get to watch a 15-minute video that rivals some of Cheech and Chong’s greatest work.I wasted time in Site Directory reviewing this piece of garbage, while Google seems totally oblivious that they are doing business with a company that is stressing: “Traffic Law #1: Ignore the Search Engines.” The Garcia’s admit to successfully and blatantly cheating Google by “playing with SEO,” but ended up paying the price and got delisted from Google SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). Or, as the Garcia’s put it, “the Google Gods decided to pull the plug on our revenue.”Before the Internet bubble’s first burst (yes, another will come), everything within our markets with a dotcom after its name came to us asking for advertising rates and information. I wonder if publishers would accept advertising from companies like Traffic Tactics in exchange for the mighty dollar. We didn’t, and I never will.

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Google is Growing Too Fast and Here’s Why

Rob Yoegel

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Rob Yoegel