Google to own an SEM & SEO firm
April 18th, 2007
News bouncing around the blogosphere lately has been that Google is set to acquire DoubleClick, one of the largest advertising agencies online, for a cool $3.1 billion.
All very interesting in itself, with Microsoft making noise that Google is starting to look anti-competitive in terms of online advertising. Many are also wondering what this means for the large amount of CPM advertising that DoubleClick run and the massive advertising clients they have (You know, the ones who are too big and ‘corporate’ to have really considered AdWords yet, but we all worry about because if they jump on the AdWords bandwagon that can only mean an increase in costs for smaller advertisers).
Stephan Spencer, however, points out something unprecedented. DoubleClick own a large SEO/SEM agency called Performics. Therefore Google are about to acquire a company who charge clients to increase their search engine positioning… on Google.
What’s even more shocking? Google state “Performics is part of DoubleClick, and we are acquiring it as part of the transaction. We have no plans to dispose of it at this time.”
I can’t believe for a second that they’ll keep Performics, but if they do (and keep the SEO side of the business), they’ll have to maintain the shiniest of white-hat ethics and have no contact with Google engineers or other data-sensitive Google employees. Will that hurt the effectiveness of their campaigns? Time will tell.
If any Performics clients want to jump ship, zoomzoom are here for you! 
Gmail continues marketing push
February 23rd, 2007
As Chris mentioned last week Gmail have been really pushing the awareness boat out recently. Google have got their own “official” YouTube account which they have been posting videos on, including “The Gmail Theatre” which gives you four puppet explained reasons to use Gmail.
This, along with Google’s launch of Premier Apps really marks a change in Google’s strategy - they aggresively trying to hussle MS into a corner and grab some of the Office market share.
Google Images back to its old self
February 21st, 2007
Someone at Google obviously pays great attention to our blog, not a week after I posted about the poor Google Images change, Google Blogoscoped reports that Google have change back to their old format.
Guess I’ll have to find something else to gripe about, then 
Google Purchases AdScape for $23M
February 19th, 2007
It seems that earlier predictions have come true, with reports surfacing that Google has purchased in game advertising company AdScape for $23M.
It will be very interesting to see how Google develops in game advertising and even more so how it makes this available to publishers, perhaps looking forward to google.com/adgames? Hopefully the ads will be a bit more seamless than this;
However, we’ve seen many games recently use basic ingame advertising. Below is a screenshot from the popular online mod of Half-Life 2, Counterstrike: Source.
..and the slightly less obvious, but still present advertising in SWAT 4
Can’t use TiVo to ignore those ads!
Google pushing Gmail after initial buzz
February 16th, 2007
Google are finally starting to push their free email product, Gmail after an initial “buzz” period. Their strategy was excellently executed from the word go; make the service exclusive by only allowing people to join by invitation, make the storage size larger than everyone else is offering (2.8GB and growing!), build the hype and buzz and then finally release it to the world!
Here are some of the signs that Google are now trying to really push their Gmail product and dominate yet another part of the internet:
An adsense advert I spotted today.
Google’s own home page.
