Google’s AdWords has thrown the ad industry into a tizzy. And rightly so. For nearly a century, ad agencies took the lion’s share of their client’s marketing budgets largely because of the ethos expressed by this famous quote from some frustrated department store owner, “Half my advertising is a waste of money. I just don’t know which half.” That glorious uncertainty made a fortune for several generations of ad firms.

Then along came Google and its perfectly relevant, targetable and measurable advertising. Not surprisingly, they’re the ones making the fortune now.

But we’ve never seen AdWords as a threat to us because we don’t sell advertising; we sell intelligence. And like any other media channel, you can use paid search words intelligently or stupidly. To give you an example of what we mean, here are two sponsored links that came up on Thesaurus.com while searching the word “legacy”.

Someone dumb and literal thought that because I was searching the word “legacy” in a thesaurus, I must be in the market for a Subaru Legacy. At the same time, someone intelligent thought about why I might be searching for the word “legacy” and put a service in front of me that would help me write an obituary.

That’s why we’ve never been particularly worried about where technology will take us, because we are firm believers that it doesn’t matter how smart the delivery system is if the message is dumb. Therefore there will always be demand for intelligent communications.