What does this acquisition mean for marketers, their agencies and publishers?

Google has bought DoubleClick for an astonishing $3.1 billion dollars. I am calling it astonishing for two reasons. The first is because DoubleClick's value was reported about a week ago as being in the mid-$1 billion range. The second is that Hellman & Friedman, the private equity owners who sold off DoubleClick, made an amazing 800 percent return on their investment, which I believe is simply a display of perfect timing and incredible marketing skills in their corporate development efforts.

Kudos to Hellman & Friedman, although I am still smiling from their comment in the Wall Street Journal, saying that this sale was a perfect example of "…heavy-duty business building that private equity does enormously well."

In my opinion, they timed the market perfectly, picking up a wounded cow and simply waiting for the market to be ripe for a lot of hype by private equity sellers. Congrats!

Based on the news, the following thought crossed my mind: What does this acquisition mean for marketers, their agencies and publishers?

All of them are somewhat interlinked obviously, and I personally only see a small initial impact for mid-market-to-large-scale advertisers, such as those that agencies like mine service -- at least for the first six months. However, it has been proven that the market can move faster than my predictions.

The acquisition of DoubleClick is mainly a technology play, where Google will now be able to offer agencies and publishers ad serving and management solutions. In an isolated view, however, nothing has changed, as the same services are currently independent from Google's other offerings and have been purchased in the current state from DoubleClick directly. So in my opinion, the first impact will occur for small businesses or entry-level online marketers. This is one area where Google has done an extremely good job. It brought sophisticated technology solutions to these marketers, and in essence, it has educated the entire business world about our sometimes misunderstood industry. A perfect example is Google Analytics, where entry-level online marketers or so-called internet presence marketers learned about conversion funnel data for the first time.

Google will now do the same in the following areas:

• Adserving and ad management for advertisers and publishers equally
• Campaign tracking and reporting
• Bid management solutions across multiple search engines

The big impact for mid-to large marketers and publishers, however, will occur when Google starts integrating DoubleClick's potpourri of technologies into its existing base of technologies.

A few other big changes that might result from the acquisition:

Single interface and technology will manage search and graphical ads, cross-publishers and search engines, including campaign reporting, creating a potential expansion into offline.
With the exception of its purchase of Urchin and turning it into its Analytics offerings, Google has always provided solutions-to-marketers that dealt with their proprietary services. Now, with the purchase of DoubleClick, Google has clearly entered the marketplace to manage campaign data across all publishers, including its competitors, Yahoo! and MSN.

The beauty of the combination is that Google will be able to integrate its search-based optimization platform into DoubleClick display advertising. The potential becomes even bigger when realizing that Google can integrate its DMarc technology platform for radio advertising in addition to its experiment with print ads. The result could be a one-stop campaign management center for marketers across multiple mediums, all integrated with Google's optimization algorithm.

Publishers will be able to optimize ad inventory by selecting highest yielding campaigns and ad formats.
Similar advantages will be offered to publishers, as a single inventory management system will be integrated for search ads, contextual listings and now graphical ads. The hypothesized outcome for all participating publishers should be ads of all formats pulled from the ad serving system in a way that will create the highest relevancy for the user, develop the highest amount of user ad interaction and lead to the highest amount of ad revenue.

Publishers, get ready to let Google sell your entire ad inventory and receive higher revenue. Maybe the publisher's sales staff is the big loser here, or have you ever seen a publisher rep sell Google text listings?

If it works, then more publishers will sign up for Google's ad system, helping the company build an ever-growing ad network. Marketers will take note of that and put Google on top of all media plans.

Increase in service offerings
Many might look at the DoubleClick purchase as a technology play for Google. Yet, a deeper look into the acquisition reveals that it includes a smaller division called Performics. The company is fairly well known in the search marketing arena and brings something to Google that I feel should be watched out for, such as customized service offerings or agency offerings. I have personally been involved in client discussions where Google was trying to manage my client's paid search engine campaign. Now with Performics, Google is adding another team with agency services in SEO, paid search and affiliate marketing. Indeed, Performics has some technology component as well, but the industry should take note that this is mainly an agency.

Wondering if the agency world should look out for Google creative services or Google Optimization services?

So now the final questions are whether this purchase was a proper investment at this price level, and if Google's competitors, such as Microsoft or Yahoo, are now left standing in the rain. Through the DoubleClick relationship, Google has found a company that, like itself, services publishers and marketers at the same time. In actuality, DoubleClick is bringing Google some publishers and clients that the giant has either not had any relationship with or a very limited one. The only other technology company that I can think of that offers the technologies at similar levels to both sides is Atlas, a division of Aquantive.

This means that Yahoo, MSN and others are now required to piece it together themselves. They will lose time, have higher acquisition costs and there will be a high probability that the systems will not fit together as nicely. So, I think that once again Google, with its large war chest of available funds, has paid a premium that will pay for itself within the next 18 months.

Google will control more publisher inventory than ever, will attract more media budgets than ever and will make users engage more than ever. Oh, I almost forgot, it will also offer more agency services than ever.

It sure is nice to sit on top of Wall Street and "google" up an empire.

Andreas Roell is CEO/president of Geary Interactive. Read full bio.