Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Google has gone through a lot of executive changes this year. Last month, the company's chief business officer Nikesh Arora announced he was leaving. And in February longtime ad boss Susan Wojcicki left that post to replace YouTube chief Salar Kamangar as the CEO of the Google-owned video service.

Ms. Wojcicki's appointment overshadowed another leadership shift. A year after being charged with running Google's advertising and commerce organization alongside Ms. Wojcicki, Google Senior VP-Advertising and Commerce Sridhar Ramaswamy had taken full responsibility for the division that accounted for more than 91% of the company's $55 billion in revenue last year.

The 11-year Google vet, who started in 2003 as an engineer on Google's search-ads team, now oversees search, display, video, analytics, shopping, payments and travel product lines. He discussed his new role in an interview below....

In anticipation of The Mashies, Mashable is running a weekly series celebrating some advertising "firsts." Watch for new installments in the series every week. As opposed to other advertising "firsts" like the first TV ad or the first print execution, bringing banner ads into the world seems like a dubious accolade.

Joe McCambley, the guy often credited with inventing the ad unit in October 1994, is somewhat conflicted about it. He recently wrote a Harvard Business Review op-ed arguing that after a promising debut, banners were a spent force by 1998: "We were back to delivering what TV spots, radio spots, and print ads had delivered for years: sales messages," he wrote. "The rest, as they say, is history."...