—Changing landscape: Sharing Sir Martin’s concern about how the possibility of a Google/DoubleClick merger would affect the industry, Moore felt it was time to seek refuge within a larger organization. And he chose to go with WPP because he felt the two businesses were complimentary: “When you look at our business – we sell online advertising, we license an ad serving web analytic technology, and we manage search budgets on behalf of advertisers. Our technology for search is called Decide DNA… combined with WPP’s search business, we now are the largest buyer of search across Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO), Google and MSN… What’s interesting about Microsoft and Google is that they both own search engine marketing companies. And, if you’re an advertiser, are you going to give your money to Google to spend on Microsoft, or vice versa? And how do you feel – if you’re a company like Yahoo – about all this?”

—Implications: “If you look at the other consolidation that is happening in the industry, DoubleClick is going to get bought by Google (NSDQ: GOOG). It’s just a matter of getting through the regulatory environment. I think strategically, it’s a good fit for them, but from a macro perspective, it’s generated a lot of concern in the industry. So you see companies like News Corp (NYSE: NWS). and NBC starting Hulu, which is direct competition with YouTube. And Viacom (NYSE: VIA) is, of course, suing Google over copyright infringement. And those are all DoubleClick customers. It’ll be interesting to see how it all pans out.” 

—Transition: “WPP runs all of its companies independently. So it’s not much of a change, other than we weren’t a public company anymore, which frankly, after 10 years, I was happy to move into a larger organization and not have to worry about a quarterly earnings statement day in and day out, although financial performance is very important to WPP. “

—Buying innovation: “I think it’s difficult for a traditional advertising organization to create their own technology. So that was the major force behind WPP acquiring us. While we don’t have the resources to compete with Google and Microsoft head-to-head on technology, what we can do is create what I would call is a selective firewall that is placed between Microsoft and Google, and only allows them in under certain terms and conditions. We look at it as ‘technology judo,’ rather than direct competition.”