Google Inc.'s dominance of the online search market has provoked concern in the advertising industry that it could also come to rule that field.
On the contrary, says Tim Armstrong, Google's president of advertising and commerce in North America. The company will actually open up opportunities for agencies to place ads online.
The need for around-the-clock online activity will lead to a proliferation - and not a loss - of ad agency jobs as people are hired to constantly analyze, test and produce new ads on the Internet, he said.
"People think that technology will shrink the market, in terms of people or other areas of the online world," he said in an interview during a visit to Toronto to meet with his Canadian team.
"I think you're going to see the opposite, actually. You're actually going to see the need for more head counts, more systems, more data integration and more investments."
Google, based in Mountain View, Calif., makes most of its money by serving up paid advertising links to people who use its search engine, but the company is also pushing into other areas.
It paid $1.76-billion (U.S.) last year to buy online video site YouTube Inc. And Google has teamed up with newspapers, radio and television stations to broker advertising in other media. Google has an impressive reach: In Canada, 86 per cent of Internet users tap into its search engine, compared with 61 per cent in the United States, according to ComScore MediaMetrix data.
Mr. Armstrong said Google is helping to transform the ad world by prompting companies to advertise all their products and services all the time, he said.
In contrast, the traditional ad model sees companies advertising only a small selection of their wares during limited periods. "The future 50 years of advertising is probably going to be an agency and a client running thousands of products and services with thousands of messages for those products and services and measuring [their effectiveness] in real time all the time."
Mr. Armstrong also said that Google is just one of many services available on the Internet, providing free service to consumers who can control their use of it. "There is tremendous choice," he said. "Consumers don't get charged for many of the services on the Internet, including Google.
In essence the Internet is the most competitive industry in the world because the products and services are for the most part free." In Canada, Mr. Armstrong sees big opportunities for Google to grow because of the country's strong economy and relatively small amount of online retailing business.
Google is working with retailers such as Home Depot Canada to try to boost its advertising presence by showing it ways that it can pitch more of its products for longer periods of time on the Internet, he said.
He gave the example of a new type of ad that Google launched six weeks ago in the United States that appears on the bottom 20 per cent of YouTube's online videos, although disappears quickly if its not prompted. The overlay ads don't disrupt the viewing experience and yet allow advertisers to reach "relevant" consumers while they're watching a video, he said.
The initiative will soon be available in Canada, and will be one of the ways Google can work to expand its presence here, Mr. Armstrong said. In this country, "we're underinvested compared to what the opportunity is."
