With the apparent early success of Bing, could we be seeing the beginning of a rival to Google that, in terms of marketing activity, receives a significant share of media agency’s attention? MSN and Yahoo search have historically been slightly neglected by media agencies (and some clients), even though there is some volume to be had. The problem is resource – it requires an equal amount of time to manage each search engine – and the benefit simply doesn’t match the cost.
If search share grows on Bing, media agencies and clients will stand to gain more from managing the search advertising and will start to do it in the intricate manner currently only afforded to Google. This means we should start to see advertiser bidding competition heating up, which would be good news for Bill Gates.
A possible offshoot of a search duopoly would be that demand grows for tools that can manage activity across multiple engines, especially the mirroring of campaigns. This seems logical as the account structures, keywords, and creative are all pretty similar for the 3 engines, which means there are some big time savings to be made by using tools (some already in existence, and new ones) that deploy the same account to all 3.
However, I do wonder that if Google begins to feel threatened, they may try to employ the little-known ‘Functional Separation’ clause in their Adwords API terms and conditions.
Functional Separation. Any information collected from an input field used to collect AdWords API Campaign Management Data may be used only to manage and report on AdWords accounts. Similarly, any information or data used as AdWords API Campaign Management Data must have been collected from an input field used only to collect AdWords API Campaign Management Data. For example, the AdWords API Client may not offer a functionality that copies data from a non-AdWords account into an AdWords account or from an AdWords account to a non-AdWords account.
In a nutshell it means 3rd party tools that use the Google API to communicate with Google can’t produce a tool that allows clients and agencies to mirror their search campaigns across the three main engines. This would mean more demands on resource and hinder revenue growth on the other engines. Having spoken to some technology service providers, they allege that Google has started to enforce this clause, but only on a few rare occasions at the moment, and not having put this to Google it is unconfirmed. I don’t know if Doubleclick will be subjected to this restriction, but apparently the decision will need to come from the very top.
