Focused and friendly at Google?

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About Conference Chatter Anecdotes, insight, observation and analysis direct from the conference circuit.

Even when Google Inc. is not the topic of discussion at ad:tech, the search giant has a way of working itself into the conversation.

Such is the reality at an Internet advertising trade show when a single company commands so much of the traffic and dollars in the space.

And while Google is sometimes described as a "frenemy" by those in the ad industry, given the company's clout, more than one attendee Nov. 4 deemed the company both friendlier, and somewhat counterintuitively, more powerful, than it had been in the past.

The first mention of the company came about 20 minutes into the first session of the show, with WPP Chief Executive Sir Martin Sorrell telling the audience that Google had become much more focused than it had ever been, saying the company was increasingly honing in on its core competencies of search and mobile while shedding auxiliary projects such as "sending robots to the moon."

Similarly, Sean Finnegan, president and chief digital officer of Starcom MediaVest Group, noted what he perceived as a return to a search focus, a shift he attributed in part to the modest early success Microsoft Corp. had shown with Bing, as well as the pending Microsoft-Yahoo! Inc. search tie-up.

Finnegan further said he believed Google saw a void in its relationship with major advertisers following the departure of former executive Tim Armstrong, and in addition to "backfilling Tim," the company added more "agency relations- and client relations-type people" to its sales force.

At the same panel, which was nominally about digital ad spending in 2010, David Kidder, CEO of the search marketing company Clickable, said he saw Google concentrating on bigger, fewer spenders and said the company was spending "a lot of time linking the Doubleclick asset in display to the outcome in search."

And while Kidder said the company was operating with the confidence that its nearly 70% of the search marketplace had nowhere to go but up, he suggested Google's development teams were not always helping matters.

"They innovate in a vacuum in a lot of ways, and that's challenging because they often destroy more value than they create," Kidder said. "While you think you are working in concert with them, you're actually not."