Can Google apply its Web-advertising formula to television?
Friday, November 21, 2008
By Erica Naone
Can Google conquer television? Yesterday, I talked with Keval Desai, product manager for Google's TV Ads unit, and he did a pretty good job convincing me that it can.
"TV is becoming like the Web," Desai says. From an advertiser's perspective, he has a point. In the 1980s, a popular TV program like The Cosby Show might have captured half the viewers in the entire United States; today's most popular shows, like American Idol, are lucky to capture a fourth of the whole audience. The difference is that there are dozens of channels now, each catering to a different set of viewers. As Desai notes, this is a lot like the Web: the audience is out there, but it's split into small bits consuming a wide variety of content.
So Google's TV Ads system works much like AdWords. An advertiser selects keywords and sets a spending limit for each day (per thousand people who see the ad). The system then figures out where and when the ad should be placed. Google is borrowing another trick from Web advertising: a soon-to-be-launched feature that lets advertisers search for shows based on audience demographics (a feature inspired by Google's search-based ad targeting).
The service is clearly aimed at a different kind of television advertiser. In addition to a simplified user interface, TV Ads includes instructions on how to visit Google's marketplace and find someone who can help make an advert. Indeed, Desai says, the plan is to draw in advertisers who don't normally put ads on TV and, as a complement, bring ad dollars to networks that don't normally have broad recognition.
The TV Ads interface already lets you select target shows based on audience age and gender information, which is in turn based on data from a partnership with Nielsen. But Desai told me about a partnership that will take this farther. A satellite-TV company called Echostar, working with credit-reporting company Equifax, will cross-reference shows watched (using its own data from set-top boxes) with income and buying habits (using Equifax's data). This will let Google offer shows to advertisers that will reach, for example, people with household incomes greater than $100,000. Desai stresses that all this data is made anonymous, so it certainly won't be possible to target specific households with ads.
I wonder how long we'll have to wait for that.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Comments
fischy on 11/23/2008 at 11:37 AM
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There have been several high profile runs, including one recently with Chase bank, that have tied individual viewing patterns, demographic data with tailored offers and interactions.
brianjking on 11/23/2008 at 2:27 PM
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fischy on 11/23/2008 at 7:48 PM
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This is pretty widely in use already. At least 4 companies are currently actively licensing viewing data down to the individual keypress level on cable TV across the country.
If anything Google is very late to this game.
http://www.mediabuyerplanner.com/2006/09/29/chase_tv_ads_to_target/
http://www.tns-mi.com/
http://www.nielsen.com/solutions/marketing_intelligence.html#segmentation
dsc22 on 11/24/2008 at 4:22 PM
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Not saying THIS idea will prove positive, but who am I to say...I'm just a programmer living paycheck to paycheck.. I can't afford to take a swing and miss... which Google has done several times.
fischy on 11/24/2008 at 5:37 PM
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When you combine that with the ability of local cable to get it down to very tight geographic regions, something that satellite cannot even remotely do, you have a much better tool to achieve waht Google is supposedly doing.
Basically, Google isn't just late to the party, they don't have access to what they need to make this special. Their game is to build a good traffic system and hope that the cable cos think it has enough merit to adopt it...otherwise this will never be a big play.
Look up Canoe Ventures or the Admira product by Navic and you'll see that this is a bit of a whiff by GOOG.
phoenix on 11/24/2008 at 8:49 AM
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rroscoe on 12/02/2008 at 12:06 AM
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