Do Adwords Campaigns Affect Search Rankings?

I've never used Adwords too much, though I've recently been seeing very good results. I'm curious if anyone has noticed a lack of serp consideration for pages or sites they have promoted with Adwords campaigns.

For example:

Let's say I have a page, written to target a specific keyword. I magically know that it will take me 6 months to rank #1 for this keyword in the SERPs.

I also have an Adwords account that I can begin immediately paying for traffic to send to that page, and it's providing a positive ROI for me, and I want to continue indefinitely.

Would the use of Adwords for this page make it take longer than the magic 6 months to rank #1 in organic results?

Gxxgle wouldn't likely ever discuss this openly, but I imagine they'd recognize advertisers would have less incentive to pay money to promote a site that already ranks on the first page.

I'd love to hear anyone that has had an experience with Adwords that would confirm or deny that fear.

When both your AdWords and SEO are dialed in and healthy... AdWords mostly steals brand searches from Organic. most businesses rank #1 for their brand and then go on to pay google for brand clicks to keep people from out bidding on their brands. Technically a violation with trademark law, but you have to sue google to get them to take action and remove ads from trademarked terms.

It is my belief that a noteworthy piece of PPC is traffic you would have gotten for free from organic. The net effect in most cases is a win since PPC can scale quickly with spend and SEO is much more slow to respond in general. So you need both. Organic giving you your best margin sales and PPC making you scalable and able to react to market situations rapidly.

Both SEO and AdWords suffer from the same limitation. You have to let your market learn what to search for and then you have to wait for them to search. Other channels like social let you target your market and proactively get in front of them to educate and inform without waiting. For niches with very low search volumes it is usually best to go social to find your customers... sponsored stories and promoted videos etc.