SimonWaldman.net

Tim Armstrong - Google VP Sales and Commerce

“We have reviewed businesses in audio and print and TV - 50% of the issue with media is mechanics, and 50% is staying up with . So we see a need for massive investment in infrastructure in all media - online and offline.”

“Google has been successful because we fore relevant connections between advertisers and consumers - and one of the things that newspapers can do, is just as important. One of the things we’re looking at in Google print is making sure that advertisers to have five different ways to contact the advertisers.”

Re: publishers

“There’s two distinct ways to look at working with Google. The first one is distribution . Two years ago - it was are you in the search index..now it’s ‘am I in feedburner’? Telling publishers to do asset maps - if you can’t write down on one sheet of paper, all the assets you have and how where you’re going to distribute them? Second thing - do I have content that can work in iGoogle”

“On the revenue side - the issue is yield management. If you were to build a media owner today, you’d have automated sales, deep integrated revenue, then have a sales force…”

“Last piece is two way conversation - every time you distribute content through a search engine, people are coming in sideways to your property..and the pages often aren’t that great…if every page is a home page what would I put on that?

Re: DoubleClick

“We’ve been talking to them for years..if you dn’t have a system that is going to connect search and display, you are going to have a bad customer experience..

Re: how far to go into publisher and agency business

“At the end of the day, Google is going to be one piece of the puzzle..if I were a publisher or ad agency, my first question would be how much information can I take out of Google that can be of use to my business…I think there’s a set of companies that are close, not just to Google..but to our competitors..and they are experiencing greater growth and success..not a detente over whether we are friends or foes..and I’d expect you to be very upset with us if we did anything to damage a publisher or agency’s business”.

Reveals - when they did the deal with AOL didn’t have enough cash or hardware to serve it..had to switch Google (I assume ads) off..

Question about China

TA: When you don’t localise enough - you tend to fall behind. Local engineering, local search - that matters a lot. We’ve been making up ground in China - a recent rule in Google - all products have to launch in all countries, which means China will move forward.

Lots of the issues for us where

DK: People make the mistake of thinking there’s on china - provinces are very different. Social networking. community based is going to work - imposing brands in the western format isn’t going t work as well.

On global accessibility

We used to think that it was about giving as many people cheap laptops as possible…but we’ve realised that mobile is going to be the main platform..Mobile and China - we woke up a couple of years ago, and realised that the world was not in teh US and thre world was not laptops..