Google recently announced a new service that Web publishers can use to manage their online ad sales and serve up ads to consumers. This news is extra interesting now that Google has DoubleClick/DART legally in their stable. I am waiting to see how much transparency they will be turning over to the advertisers and how much overlapping functionality they will have with their other technology acquisitions. I bet they parade this out with much fanfare as a beginner solution with plenty of easy links to upgrade and the upgrade solution is DART. It really comes down to how “advertiser-centric” you can be when you are talking about ad serving. What this industry doesn’t need is just another ad network. What this industry does need is to lose the opacity that has plagued it since the earliest days. Advertisers need brand safety today and brand safety depends on transparency. You can only rest assured that your brand is being represented properly in the Wild-Wild-West that is online advertising when you know where every single impression is going. Not to mention detailed categorization. If anyone can provide the industry with useful contextualization it’s Google but I doubt they will. I want to see some proof reports showing how well they target and every impression URL from this new offering before I make the call whether or not this is a good thing for our industry.