Advertising isn't dead, it just belongs to Google

Advertising is thriving.

Unfortunately, advertising agencies don't seem to be.

If advertising agencies and their holding companies had convinced themselves that the status quo somehow still prevailed, they haven't logged in to Google lately.

Those little Ads by Google. Charming, aren't they? Well, that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Now, as of this week, Google will place your real live display advertisement, a real print advertisement, in the newspaper of your choice -- The New York Times, the Des Moines Register, the Atlanta Journal Constitution and hundreds of other major newspapers across the country. All you have to do is click. And if you don't have an advertisement you can place, well, that's not a problem. They have templates you can use. Or you can build your own. They even do "image" ads.

Is that enough to convince you that advertising as we know it is dead? No? Well, consider this.

Google will help you create a radio commercial and place it in a hundred-plus radio stations across the country.

Rupert Murdock, Chairman of News Media, owner of My Space and The Wall Street Journal, recently explained his anxiety about new media, moving fast, and being first.

We have to get there before everything belongs to Google, he said.

WPP, Interpublic and Omnicom probably lost 'agency' status long ago, as their agency brands burrowed deeply into online, public relations and other businesses.

Yet they jealousy guard their 'creative' turf.

But if a group at Unilever's Dove decided they could create nifty radio commercials of their own making and place them with Google. And if a team at Ford did the same thing. And the folks at Pepsi decided an exciting promotional radio campaign could be created, craftsperson style, right in their own offices, and placed on radio stations anywhere their sales people asked for ... aren't we looking at an advertising armageddon in some way, shape or form?

Those Google ads may be unsophisticated.

(Actually, Google Adwords today are very smart, and a lot of very smart writers are creating them.)

It's only a matter of time. Google ads will be as slick and polished as they need to be and no advertising agency fingerprints ever will be found on them.

It's just another way our world has changed.