While I do not disagree with what you have to say with regards to Google getting to claim credit for skimming the cream off of their advertisers' own brand equity (and then selling that cream to them at impressive prices), that's sort of orthogonal to the point I was making. Specific to, say, AdWords, the point I'm making is that people who a) have enough development capability to ship software products and b) also know AdWords well enough to get entrusted with a company's budget are as rare as hen's teeth. Because many, many companies have 6 figure AdWords spends monthly and generate millions of dollars of revenue as a result of them, someone who is capable of applying their skills horizontally across a company's AdWords operation (+) can be very, very useful to have around.
There's approximately four people in the world that can do that. Two of them like their jobs, one just got funded, and the fourth one can charge whatever he darn pleases. (This is an exaggeration, but not much of one.)
+ You might naively assume I'm talking about the AdWords API, but there are so many things a developer could do to wring extra money out of an AdWords campaign that it is virtually cheating. A consulting client once bragged to me that they had a lot of landing pages, and they asked me how many I had. It turns out that they had 11 and I had, at the time, only 900-something. There are a lot of marketing departments which think that developing 900 landing pages would take a team of 20 people the better part of a year. A properly motivated intermediate Rails developer could bang that out on any given Monday. (P.S. If you're not going to make the company a million bucks next Monday, consider banging this out.)
There's approximately four people in the world that can do that. Two of them like their jobs, one just got funded, and the fourth one can charge whatever he darn pleases. (This is an exaggeration, but not much of one.)
+ You might naively assume I'm talking about the AdWords API, but there are so many things a developer could do to wring extra money out of an AdWords campaign that it is virtually cheating. A consulting client once bragged to me that they had a lot of landing pages, and they asked me how many I had. It turns out that they had 11 and I had, at the time, only 900-something. There are a lot of marketing departments which think that developing 900 landing pages would take a team of 20 people the better part of a year. A properly motivated intermediate Rails developer could bang that out on any given Monday. (P.S. If you're not going to make the company a million bucks next Monday, consider banging this out.)