Giving up control is good for Quigo, and the rest

It is the number one place to work in America according to Fortune Magazine and at the heart of the reason is that it is all about the people; the atmosphere, the food, the events. Google knows how to treat the employees. They culturally understand the dynamic of interpersonal relationships in making people happy.

This understanding expands to the way they treat their advertisers. At Google, I have worked with some of the nicest people I’ve met. They cultivate the relationships, understand the importance of good communication and go out of their way to make us feel important within the scope of business.

However, I wonder how Google views this dynamic between businesses and people outside its scope. They build tools that interject themselves between advertisers and publishers, agencies and clients. I looked at this before when it came to radio. The principals of dMark left, in part because they did not believe you can simply automate the relationship between buyers and sellers. There is a value to the interpersonal contact.

Quigo is demonstrating that the principle holds true for contextual advertising as well. While their transparency is important, I believe one of the greatest assets their platform has is the ability of the publisher to have direct sales and interaction with the advertisers. Instead of using the platform to create a vale between the two as Google does (and Yahoo!), they use it to help facilitate the interactions, with the added value of providing additional advertisers to the publisher if they choose.

Google’s push for innovation has been hampered by its dependence on the status quo. Now that they are big and mainstream with investors to please, they can’t do things that will put their current revenue at greater risk. Thus, change will only come when pushed on the market by other players. In this case, transparency and facilitating relationships between publishers and advertisers come at Quigo’s beckoning. Google follows in transparency.

The next acquiescence from Google will have to come in the form of control, allowing the publisher, through the Google platform to directly manage the advertiser base for its site. This is not what Google wants. They understand their importance in the advertiser relationship. But, if Quigo scales, pulls more major publishers, Google will be relegated to tertiary site traffic via adSense. I don’t think most people believe this is likely. But the dynamics of interpersonal relationships make this a very real possibility.

Despite 6 Sigma (and its predecessors) and all the business books’ protestations to the contrary, the world of business does not begin and end with efficiency. Yes, we must spend our dollars wisely. But, wise decisions start with trust, and trust is about relationships, not numbers. While Google understands this in its dealings with its employees, and with the work they do with us directly, they seam to discount it when looking at the interactions between other businesses. They can not assume their tools will be adopted over alternatives simply by claiming they are more efficient or effective. I guess the change here is that we now have alternatives.