This jumped out at me from John Battelle’s end-of-the-year predictions for 2008:

Google will continue to struggle with its display advertising business, at least as it is traditionally understood, in part due to a culture conflict between its engineering-based roots and the thousands of media-saavy sales and marketing folks the company has hired in the past two years.

I really want to know how display advertising is going to take root on the Web, and Google is either going to show us how to do it or show us how not do it, if you know what I mean.

And somewhere in there, something novel is going to happen.

BTW, what is the conflict John refers to between engineering and marketing? Why does it exist? What’s the third way?

My short answer is that you can’t leverage the network without technology and you can’t leverage the community without communication.

Display advertising – that breaks out – is going to draw from the power of both the network and the community (and also elements of search). It’s the new DNA.

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