NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Google has spent a lot of time in the past few years trying to quell fears it's out to disintermediate advertising agencies. Now it's undertaking a major effort trying to educate them on all things digital.
Enter AgencyLand. It may sound like an amusement park, but it's actually an online educational portal Google is developing for ad shops, one that likely will help the search giant deeper entrench itself in an ad-agency community that's often been wary of it.
The AgencyLand platform, now in beta with select agencies, houses a ton of Google-centric content created for agency staff. Naturally, much of it is focused on digital topics. There are webinars, a searchable library with more than 200 marketing case studies and short, on-demand video segments featuring Google leaders such as Chief Economist Hal Varian. It also aggregates Google's array of ad tools, such as a media-planning tool that connects advertisers and publishers and a website optimizer, which helps measure user behavior on web pages.
Google maintains it has altruistic intentions of bettering everyone's digital knowhow, but the program surely doubles as a marketing effort. Given that Google offers advertisers the chance to essentially help themselves create highly measurable and relevant, if unflashy, ads, agencies have been wary that Google could one day get between them and clients.