Digital marketing is one channel of marketing and arguably the most cost effective compared to out of home, direct mail, direct response, tv/radio, endorsements etc. Google will argue because of cost efficiencies in the market, it has allowed hundreds of brands to effectively compete against established players creating a more competitive landscape.
Here’s an example: Dollar Shave Club launched with a only digital marketing strategy and pressured Gillette to significantly cut prices to the net benefit of consumers. Without digital marketing, DSC wouldn’t have got off the ground.
The. Consumer in this case is businesses themselves. There isn't a magucal difference between B2B consumers and B2C consumers except that B2B's have the luxury of pushing costs down to customers. You don't get to hide behind that you enabled the transaction at all when you acquired everyone else who was also doing so, and colluded with your chief competitor. It's the central trade-off between a Hamiltonian monolith, and a Jeffersonian bazaar. The Monolith can probably get you cheaper prices for a while, but at the cost of any new entrants to the market. The bill is paid in Liberty. In a Jeffersonian bazaar, tge wide variety of competing models and lower barrier of entry keeps everyone honest even if you can't exploit the same level of hyper-optimization the monolith brings to the table. You also avoid tge risk inherent to the Hamiltonian approach of the Monolith destructively influencing everything around it. Too big to fail is less of an issue because there are other fish, not just pods of whales.
Edit: May be confusing Hamilton and Jefferson with Hobbes and Locke again.
But there is also truth to the argument that more competition would (probably) have driven prices down, and that Google and FB colluding to fix prices in auctions caused this
Here’s an example: Dollar Shave Club launched with a only digital marketing strategy and pressured Gillette to significantly cut prices to the net benefit of consumers. Without digital marketing, DSC wouldn’t have got off the ground.