Meg Whitman is the CEO of eBay. She comes from a Harvard business background, with stops at such places as Procter and Gamble, Disney and Hasbro. Ms Whitman has a reputation of being effective, fair and unpretentious. She is a CEO who works from a cubicle, just like a real on the job person. Considering Ms Whitman’s wealth of experience and stellar reputation, Google must have made a significant ‘faux pas’ when eBay pulled its advertising away from Google. This would have been an executive decision that reached the very top of the food chain.

Of course, there are two sides of the story. Nevertheless, eBay advertising was not on Google. On Friday, Google and eBay set aside their animus:

“After a spat between two of the world’s largest Internet companies, online auctioneer EBay Inc. resumed running advertising through Google Inc. on Friday.

EBay recently pulled ads from the world’s most popular search engine in what the auction company billed as an experiment to determine the most effective means of getting customers to visit the shopping site…”

link: After spat between rivals, Ebay returns to Google advertising

Because this write-up mentions the word ‘eBay’, the Google advertising for the auction site should be appearing on the page you are currently viewing. Clicks on the Google adwords should take you again to eBay auction related pages. The removal of the advertising would have had a negative financial impact on both Google and eBay. Now they are “pals” again. And of course, the lesson is that reconciliation is facilitated when there is money to be made. - Ms Whitman may have worked at Hasbro but she is no ‘potato head’. Google generates clicks.

Catherine Forsythe

[tags]meg whitman, google, ebay, advertising, reconciliation, adwords, money[/tags]