Back when Google's automated search keyword auction was first introduced, this reporter was given an alpha preview. The system was impressive, but the PR flack - who was also the project manager - was disappointed to hear the reaction: it's great, and it'll never sell an Agency Land because mainstream media buyers just don't buy this way. At the time, buying search keywords was largely done by paper insertion orders faxed between offices. MarketingVOX's correspondent was, of course, very wrong. The agencies that have declined to use Google's AdWords have now seen their online business migrate to search agencies with their own complex systems of keyword management and optimization.

So it's not terribly surprising that this morning both ClickZ and MediaPost shared an idea, publishing canvasses of the online buying industry indicating skepticism at the prospect of Google offering a set of features geared at attracting brand advertisers online: CPM buying, graphic ads and the ability to control which sites make the buy. That skepticism may also be the product of unease; a hand-wringing reaction to a harbinger of the end of an old way of making markets for media.

"It may bring some new people in, but it's not a deal-closer," on wag told ClickZ. MediaPost's headline tells readers "Branded Advertising Ambitions Likely To Face Resistance From Top Marketers, Publishers." And resist they may. The real issue determining Google's new system's potential is more a matter of the macro economic trend of a new and vast supply of manipulable inventory now available to compete in the hurly burly of price fixing.

The online media markets are today rather different than they were back during the dot-com bust, when Google first introduced its automated search auction. Google now has brand network competition in the form of strong, well-backed companies like Advertsing.com, Burst and others. Business will not simply default to Google as people adopt the more efficient buying process. Google's media offerings will have to compete on perceived effectiveness, which will again pit branded content offerings - and the mass of the sell-side's vested interests - against aggregated networks of miscellaneous media collected together under a layer of added targeting features.

For publishers, this may shift debate from the question of paid content versus advertising revenues to which type of advertising revenues make most sense: selling the site as a brand, or dumping the inventory into a larger media pool. In the absense of a fast, efficient market for aggregated media that commands high CPMs, the status quo looks fairly attractive, but Google's move into the market may bring with it substantial additional budgets. A part of that 35 percent of the online media market that got sliced off to search may come back to the CPM markets.