Schmidt on Ads After DoubleClick Buy, Viacom Suit (A Mistake?)

Today at the D5 conference, Google CEO Eric Schmidt was asked about the DoubleClick deal and what it means for online ads. The AllThingsD site has coverage of the talk, in which Schmidt was asked, “Does Google’s DoubleClick acquisition portend a movement away from spartan, text-based ads to more invasive display ads?” His response was vague (no surprise), according to what the D site says: “As we broaden our mission from an advertising perspective, Schmidt says, we want to solve the ad problem in general and bring engineering to it.”

Also, by way of PaidContent, the Viacom issue came up during the talk. Schmidt said Viacom’s suit was probably a mistake. The media monster “should have waited for the tools to have been built,” he said. I guess this means Viacom should have waited for Google/YouTube to unveil the magic copyright protection technology they’ve been telling media firms they’ll enable…eventually. Schmidt also called the suit a “business negotiation tool,” according to PaidContent’s report.

Still, hasn’t the promise of a technology for monitoring copyrighted material on YouTube also been a negotiating tool for Google in scoring content relationships from various media partners?