Google a Brand's Best Friend, or Frenemy?

Last month we pondered how Google search results can harm brands. Now Google's aiming to help top brands surface at the top of its rankings.

One catch: before Google can be a brand's best friend, the brand must first cozy up to DoubleClick.

When Google purchased DoubleClick for a little over $3 billion in 2007, it was seen as a strategic move to give the search giant new capabilities and influence in online advertising. It didn't hurt that it was also a competitively smart salvo against rival Microsoft.

Ever since the acquisition, Google has honed DoubleClick and made it a more integrated service. Now Google is offering top brand advertisers the ability to cherrypick the top 1,000 largest sites on the web for their ads to run.

By using DoubleClick Ad Planner, a free media planning tool, advertisers can identify the top-ranked sites and, in effect, targets ads to the largest number of users at any given time.

Ironically, however, this doesn't guarantee that a brand advertiser is reaching the sites best-suited for its particular product or service, since the Ad Planner does not take performance statistics into account. In fact, a brand advertiser may be filtering out sites that are relevant.

But the "shock and awe" strategy could be suitable for large brand advertisers who want to make a big splash fast, to as many online consumers as possible.

The DoubleClick Ad Planner also offers advertisers the opportunity to define an audience with multiple criteria, including keywords, use ranking methods to find targeted sites, set filters to parse sites by various criteria, such as specific categories, and add sites to a media plan for comparison.