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American media—television, radio, newspapers, magazines—depended for their existence on a long-entrenched advertising model. In the old method, at which Karmazin excelled, the ad sales force depended on emotion and mystery, not metrics. “You buy a commercial in the Super Bowl, you’re going to pay two and one-half million dollars for the spot,” Karmazin said. “I have no idea if it’s going to work. You pay your money, you take your chances.” To turn this lucrative system over to a mechanized auction posed a serious threat. “I want a sales person in the process, taking that buyer out for drinks, getting an order they shouldn’t have gotten.” What would happen if advertisers expected measured results from the $3 million spent for each thirty-second ad for NBC’s 2009 Super Bowl, or for the approximately $60 billion spent on television advertising in the United States each year? Or the estimated $172 billion spent in the United States on advertising, and the additional $227 billion spent on marketing, including public relations, direct mail, telemarketing, and sales promotions? “That’s the worst kind of business model in the world,” he said—the worst, that is, if you’re an old-school ad man. “You don’t want to have people know what works. When you know what works or not, you tend to charge less money than when you have this aura and you’re selling this mystique.” For sixty years, network television sold much of its advertising in an “up-front” each spring and summer after the new fall shows were announced. Even as audiences were declining, executives created a cattle-stampede mentality by convincing advertisers they’d get shut out of the hit shows if they didn’t buy early. Karmazin and the networks continued to charge ever-steeper rates because, he said, “advertisers don’t know what works and what doesn’t. That’s a great model.”
    The Google executives were equally appalled. They thought Karmazin’s method manipulated emotions and cheated advertisers; just as egregiously, it wasn’t measurable and was therefore inefficient. They were convinced they could engineer a better system.
    By then, Karmazin knew there was little he and Google could do for each other. “I was selling twenty-five billion dollars of advertising,” he said. “Did I want someone to know what worked and what didn’t?” Like the aging Falstaff, he had “heard the chimes at midnight.” Karmazin trained his eyes on his Google hosts, his hands folded on the table, his cuff links gleaming, and protested, only half in jest, “You’re fucking with the magic!”
     
     
     
    DAYS LATER, that line was still echoing in the halls of the Googleplex. Every Friday afternoon, Google employees assemble for what they call TGIF. They nibble on snacks and drink beer or soft drinks and sit in a semicircle as Schmidt and the company founders make surprisingly candid disclosures—about the latest financial results, visitors who’ve come that week, deals pending—and answer employee questions. Marissa Mayer, who joined the company in 1999 as an engineer and is today vice president, search products & user experience, remembered the meeting vividly. Schmidt, flanked by Page and Brin, said, “Mel Karmazin, the head of Viacom, came and found us interesting. They really don’t know what to think of us. We really don’t know what to think of them.”
    “The choice quote that characterizes the whole meeting,” Brin chimed in, “was when the head of Viacom said, ‘You’re fucking with the magic!’” For Googlers, as they often refer to themselves, Karmazin’s deference to tradition was anathema; they questioned everything. Mayer said the Google founders always asked, “Why does this have to be the way it is? Why can’t you ‘fuck with the magic?’”
    Since Google’s birth in 1998, as Schmidt acknowledges, Google has set out systematically to attack the magic. “If Google makes the market more efficient,