“Google is an online advertising company that has plans to become a software company. Microsoft is a software company that has plans to become an online advertising company.

They’re both much better than the other in their current area of strength at the moment, but they’re both looking a little uninteresting in that area as the other catches up in exciting ways.

They both have a lot of money to get where they want to be.”

Jason Kelly

“In a NYT story on Publicis’s alignment around digital ad production, CEO Maurice Levy tells the Times that Google, MSN and Yahoo ‘will have to make a choice between being a medium or being an ad agency, and I believe that their interest will be to be a medium.’

In fact, they don’t have to make that choice at all, and each of those companies already is a huge ad agency as well as media network. This is most blatantly the case with Microsoft, which will shortly acquire one of the world’s largest digital agency networks. But Yahoo is also diving deep into digital ad production, most notably with its recent SmartAds product, which can marry creative assets to a database of segmented offers to create and serve hundreds or thousands of versions of an ad on the fly.”

Zachary Rodgers