Bill Gates:"The future of advertising is online"

And then - a week after this historical speech - he bought aQuantive for USD 6 billion. The biggest investment  ever done by Microsoft. “We’re saying newspapers will go online, and there will be massive innovation that comes out of that. We’re saying that TV, the biggest ad market in the world, will completely go online and have the kind of targeting interaction that you only get out on the Web today". Google, Microsoft and some of the advertising holding companies fully understand the huge value of data. Their value has indeed been proven again over the last weeks. The USD 3.1 billion Google-move with Doubleclick and the USD 6 billion Microsoft-move with aQuantive brings these giants now very close to our world. To the good old Publicis, Interpublic and WPP – networks. Although the proud WPP also moved in a USD649 million take-over of 24/7 Real Media, they and their direct competitors could themselves be future take-over targets. Google has a market cap of USD 147 billion. WPP of USD 18 billion.
But there have been other events in the same period. A while ago Blackstone (the Blackstone indeed in which PRC plans to buy a 10% stake for USD 3 billion and that will go IPO in a few weeks) bought Alliance Data – not a medium, nor a portal but a credit card services provider – for USD 6.43 billion. {{ And what i read only a day after this post, is that Kohlberg Kravis Roberts bought another card processor First Data for even $27 billion. }} Mid May Acxiom was bought by another private equity company for about USD 3 billion. Axciom is a provider of computer and database services. In China they bought 2 yrs ago the DM-agency Chinaloop. Apparently it doesn’t matter anymore on which side you are, or where and how you’re gathering these consumer data. You can be an online media owner selling your own space. You can be a media buyer “selling” 3rd party-space to brands. You can be both. You can be an aggregator of different media. You can be an IT-supplier to both parties and to the advertising agencies. The only thing you should be able to own … are “the data”.  But you never own them on your own. All involved parties own a little bit. Online media owners know all about their own audience and how they interact with branded banners. Agencies and media buyers (if they're in digital &interactive like i-merge) know everything about the behavior of their clients’ clients. And the brands … they alone know whether all the fuzz&buzz eventually brought real sales or only void leads. So in the end none of the parties involved owns it all. We all have to cooperate. Isn't it nice?