To gain marketing knowledge P&G and Google swap staff

Maybe it is one of the reasons that Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) and Procter & Gamble (NYSE: PG) are among the best managed companies in America. They will go to almost any legitimate lengths to improve their knowledge of businesses that will help them expand and prosper.

P&G would like to know more about how to sell its scores of products online. Google wants to know more about TV advertising. The search company has been trying to break into the television commercial brokerage business for over a year, with little success.

According to The Wall Street Journal, "So far, about two-dozen staffers from the two companies have spent weeks dipping into each others staff training programs and sitting in on meetings where business plans get hammered out." That should worry other media that make money from P&G's $8 billion plus annual marketing budget. Google may not be sending people to learn about TV; it may simply trying to sell its own product.

While P&G may learn something about how to use search ads to get more people into stores, Google stands to pick up a decent piece of the packaged goods company's product sales budget. Magazine publishers, TV executives, and radio managements are not being brought in for similar gatherings. They do not have such an intimate platform for making their cases.

Google has always been remarkably clever. Now it is hurting the competition by climbing into the customer's tent.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.