How Google Plans to Take Over TV
Can Google apply its Web-advertising formula to television?
Erica Naone 11/21/2008
- 7 Comments
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.
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fischy
3 Comments
Minor Correction
Television has been targeting by demographic for quite some time. Claritas Prizm is specifically designed to deliver demographic info down to the block tract level to match up with cable ad zones. The advertising schedule is then matched to the demos of a particular neighborhood. When an advertiser says they are looking for a particular demo a local cable company can match it up very closely. In fact, much more so than satellite.
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.
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brianjking
4 Comments
Re: Minor Correction
Do you have any links of information regarding this data collection you speak of? I am doing my thesis on this topic and I need content for my literature review. Thank you. Bye!
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fischy
3 Comments
Re: Minor Correction
Shouldn't you be doing the research yourself?
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
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dsc22
2 Comments
Re: Minor Correction
It's not about being late to the party... Google has been late several times, but still turns heads when it arrives. Their process is ingenious, basically saying that they don't care if they are late, they just look at things a bit different than normal (e.g. instead of using Nielson ratings, use satellite/cable provider census data)... which in turn can become huge.
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.
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fischy
3 Comments
Re: Minor Correction
you still missed it...the census data is already being collected by Nielsen, TNS, TRA and at least one other company I know of... This "census" data, known as subscriber data in the trade, is aleady widely available and used to build highly targeted and segmented ad schedules.
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.
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