VentureBeat

Publicis, a leading advertising conglomerate, and Google (stock ticker pictured, above)are planning to work together, the companies announced today.

Through this partnership, Publicis could help Google make even more money out of its online advertising operations, through creating ads that convince you to buy more — especially on relatively untapped Google properties, such video site YouTube. If this effort works, it will result in Google ads making more money for a wide range of small web publishers.

Paris, France-based Publicis will provide creative talent such as web designers and graphic artists while Google will provide its broad range of ad formats, that reaches most of the web. The partnership is non-exclusive.

Online advertising itself is expected to rise to $27.5 billion this year, up 28.5 percent from 2007. Google needs to figure out how to make more money from its advertising, despite its unmatched success to date, because the increasingly likely recession would result in less advertising spending, and lower revenues for the company. As you can see from the stock price (pictured), some investors are apparently thinking about this already.

“Google is many things, but one thing we are not is creative. We’re a bunch of programmers, basically,” Google chief executive Eric Schmidt said in reference to Publicis’ focus on creating advertising.

Google is a technology company, and doesn’t have a large in-house ad-creation team. Google Adsense and AdWords ads prove text-based or third-party video ads, although it does have an in-house AdWords creative team, as commenter Don notes below. Meanwhile, Publicis has not bought its way into online advertising. It has not invested in online advertising companies as heavily as rivals like WPP and others, HipMojo notes.

Many advertisers and their agencies, including Publicis, are still struggling to figure out which types of online ads can promote them most effectively. This is especially notable in online video, as online video distributor and video ad agency Broadband Enterprises told me last week.

Google has a relatively untapped goldmine in online video advertising, through its booming video site, YouTube. Publicis may have the chance to perfect video advertising that monetizes through its relationship with Google, and its access to YouTube.

YouTube has found ad overlays — ads that appear on a lower part of a video as it plays — to be popular with users, as PaidContent points out in a good summary of the latest survey data on video formats that people like (or hate).

Also, YouTube keeps distancing itself from competitors. 74 million people watched 39 videos each on average in November, according to comScore. That month, YouTube and Google Video generated nearly a third of all video views on the new, at 31.3 percent. Number two Fox Media Interactive came in at 4.4 percent.