More years ago than I care to recall, Matthew and I (the two founders of Blog Relations) worked on a trade paper. We both fondly remember a gloomy but likable ad salesman called “Bondy”. After doing his daily round of “smile and dial” calls he would come over and report, “It’s the Goby Desert out there boys”.

Skip forward more than a decade to the dotcom boom. I was working on a .co.uk with a very able and more cheerful ad salesman who could have sold sand to a Mongolian tribesman in the Gobi Desert. He used to take his clients (well I suppose his male clients) to the Venus Lap Dancing Club across the road. They would buy online banner ads by the bucket load at very fancy prices. If the .co.uk hadn’t been burning even more money in its own multi-million advertising campaign, it might have broken even.

Now those who ply the ad sales trade are starting to look a bit redundant. They are being replaced by an enormous automated production line known as “Google” which places advertisements infront of relevant eyes almost by magic, or, as Google would prefer to say, “by science.” Advertisers are getting more careful how they spend their money. They are at last beginning to realise that the sales patter and the lap dancing are not really the point.

“This year, Google will sell $6.1 billion in ads, nearly double what it sold last year, according to Anthony Noto, an analyst at Goldman Sachs. That is more advertising than is sold by any newspaper chain, magazine publisher or television network,” reports the New York Times “Google wants to dominate Madison Avenue, too”

One of the key employees at Google is a former ad salesman himself. When he was at Netscape, Omid Kordestani used to sell multi-million sponsorship deals. He came to Google as its twelfth employee and called up the same clients offering them $1000 deals to buy “key words” to produce little text ads when people searched the internet.

In this inteview with John Battelle on his Search Blog, Kordestani denies that Google wants to do down the ad agencies of Madison Avenue. They need to work with them - but anyone who is interested in how the media business has been so severely disrupted in such a very short space of time should read both the Kordestani interview and the New York Times article.