Google Adds Agency Clause to AdWords TOS

Threadwatch predictive comments are getting sharper by the day. Earlier today lerue17 stated

Ad agencies want a percentage of sales from the creative campaigns they design for clients. Google may be heading in that direction with "quality landing pages." The AdsBot crawler will just be highlighting which advertisers Google should ignore, and those it should develop a more intimate relationship with to increase its bottom line.

Google just updated their AdWords TOS to include the following

6 Agency. Customer represents and warrants that (a) it is authorized to act on behalf of and has bound to this Agreement any third party for which Customer advertises (a "Principal"), (b) as between Principals and Customer, the Principal owns any rights to Program information in connection with those advertisements, and (c) Customer shall not disclose Principal's Program information to any other party without Principal's consent.

Is this statement to protect the remaining agencies? Or to protect Google for when they start acting as an agency? Google's update section says

One of the main changes you may notice in the new Google Advertising Program Terms is that the terms anticipate future advertising products that may become available in other advertising formats and mediums. As we look forward to integrating more advertising products, we've re-worded some portions of the terms to make them applicable across a broader array of mediums and formats--anticipating, for example, that future products may be priced, billed, or managed differently than the current products.

It makes sense that they would want to cut agency commissions if they preferred to bring that service in house. Plus where better to gain scaled increased recurring revenue than from an established huge stream.

The question is, will participating in Google's ad optimization service (and thus let them double dip) automatically improve your landing page and ad quality level?

lerue17 also posted that they thought the landing page crawling might also have something to do with Google trying to work a CPA angle on traditional media ads that integrated with quality landing pages.

If Google does go this route I think it hurts their perception of credibility with a large bias toward avertisers. It could hurt them far more than they will financially gain out of it. Even in their early research they strongly stated their lack of support and concern with advertiser bias on search engines that were an ad driven business.

Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web [Page, 98]. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.