Google has moved one step closer to integrating full display media buying capabilities with yesterday’s announcement of Google Ad Planner. Right now this is a bare bones research tool that you have to export into a more robust tool like Doubleclick MediaVisor in order to do a complete media buy but one has to believe this is only the first step in what will be a much bigger piece of Google’s business moving forward.

Google invested $3.1 billion dollars in the acquisition of DoubleClick and while I don’t normally make predictions for this sort of thing I think there are some interesting things we might expect to see in the next 12 months as a results of this deal:

• Free ad serving – just like they bought Urchin and gave away the analytics, one can easily see the value in giving away ad serving in order to get the advertiser adoption and data that Google wants.
• Free media planning and buying tools – Ad Planner is the first step, but real agency media buyers need a complete end to end solution. I expect Google will give this away as well in order to drive more online ad buying through their network.
• Integrated data / order attribution – Right now customers are hitting multiple advertising touch points such as display, search, affiliate, etc and marketers have the challenge of properly crediting each channel with their “share” of the order. DoubleClick already has this technology and I would expect this to be integrated into Google Analytics at some point soon.
• Behavioral targeting capabilities – This will be a tricky one. Google now sits in the middle of a massive amount of data and would have the ability to serve ads based on past search and browsing habits. There will definitely be privacy concerns and although the value to advertisers would be great, the consumer backlash could be a big problem.