There’s a new addition to Google Spain and this time it’s not yet another valuable service sprouting on the endless list of Google tools and gadgets. Google has signed on a new team player to take charge of its operations in Spain After a long recruitment year, last week, Isabel Aguilera became Google’s leading woman in Madrid, Google’s Spanish headquarters. Aguilera comes with an impressive portfolio of highly influential positions and a successful track line. Just recently she was the COO of NH Hotels, one of the leading hotel chains out of Spain. Prior to that position she left a mark on Dell, while in charge of operations in Spain, Italy and Portugal. And even further back, she held another important position in Olivetti and Hewlett Packard.
Apart form Aguilera, who is now the General Director in Spain, Google has named Bernardo Hernández its new Director of Marketing. Prior to these new developments, Miguel de la Reina was the highest authority in Google Spain, as the Commercial Director, a position he continues to hold. In fact, it is no secret that Google’s office in Spain is of a purely commercial nature.
However, these new assignments lead one to wonder what it all means for Google and for us, search engine marketers, who work very closely with Google. Google has 90% of the market share in Spain. Sure, MSN and Yahoo are doing all they can to cover more ground and even smaller players such as Ask, Seekport and recently TPI’s Noxtrum are fighting to pick up the breadcrumbs, as valuable alternative engines. But certainly Google has nothing to worry about. So why the new assignments? Is Google finally taking the Spanish market more seriously? And if so, does it mean that the Spanish market has finally matured enough to deserve the attention. It would certainly make sense. Pay per click advertising grew by 36% percent last year. The growth spurt was the largest compared to any other advertising medium. The number of DSL connections grew by 54% last year. This January, there were 5,108,499 high speed connections. There is a lot of buzz about Google, search engines and advertising online. Even the smaller merchants are getting caught up.
There’s definitely an exciting future to anticipate. Perhaps Google feels the same way.
Marina Zaliznyak
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