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Google to Transform Television Advertising?
Brad Zink writes "According to Robert X. Cringely, Google is poised to enter into the world of television advertising. This would usher in a new era for the venerable medium, creating a tidal wave of revenue for the networks, while solidifying Google's position in the advertising industry. Cringely develops this prediction based on his belief that Google is developing a network of data centers to be placed around the globe, which would be used to serve television commercials in addition to its current online content."
When it comes to google I find that advertising isn't a problem. Google aren't weren't "in your face intrusive" and I feel fine having them there, it's the ones that pop up, make loud noises or drain my CPU which are the ones I hate.
I think when it comes to advertising, Google can somehow pull it off.
".... knowing that Google will still be the only game in town for the crux of the whole thing: the ability to show every viewer the specific ads that companies will pay the most to show him at that specific moment. What Google wants to do with these trailers is SERVE EVERY TV COMMERCIAL ON THE PLANET because only they will be able to do it efficiently. Only they will have the database that converts those IP addresses into sales leads, only they will have the servers and disk space close enough to the viewers to feed the ads. Only Google will have the chops to run a constant, real-time auction for the next ad every consumer is about to see, and then serve that ad at the moment the program goes to commercial."
So you really want that Viagra/Valtrex/Cialis/Levitra ad to always be showing up when your new girlfriend is watching TV with you?
I would think not.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
This could be an interesting idea, but Google's advertising model doesn't translate so well to television. How would you go about compartmentalising viewers into groups, and serving the relevant ad? Sure, you could go on household viewing stats, but that might require extra hardware to get to; and I'm sure some people would object.
Also, it can't be as simple as the article suggests - when you have someone going to Google.com, you can be fairly sure there is one person (usually) behind the monitor. Many many more in front of the TV. How do you weight your targeting?
I just can't see how this would practically work.
Sure, it's just a "what if," but if Google hasn't thought of this already, they should. It's a nearly perfect extrapolation from AdSense: contextual advertising for television.
If they could also get in bed with the media metrics folks, like Nielsen, they'll be able to tie in the demographic information and, like Cringely supposes, only show Alzheimers drug ads to seniors and their children, and only show beer ads to people over 21.
If Google does go in this direction, I can only hope that ads will be rotated in the manner of AdWords ads. I.E: Only the ads that interest people will be shown, or shown more often. I love to watch well-done commercials, and most of them are so poorly scripted that they A) don't convince me to buy and B) are just plain boring.
I don't know that this is going to happen, or if it's even feasible, but it sure is fun to think about.
Google are betting that they can deliver TV episodes for free, with advertising.
Problem: We can already get them for free, with no advertising...
Number One, set a course of Pirate Bay. Maximum warp.
When he's right, it's only because he makes so many stupid, hacky positions and predictions that by the law of averages he has to hit one once in awhile.
Not to say he's a bad source of information, mind you, just that he's a source of information no better than, say, a magic 8 ball.
If they could also get in bed with the media metrics folks, like Nielsen, they'll be able to tie in the demographic information
If Google went into this space, they would almost instantly put Neilsen out of business.
Neilsen familys need to volenterr, and be paid. Google can give *actual real* dmeographic infromatio, because they already know where you live (from the cable company), and what you are interested in (from Google searches), and who you talk to (from GTalk/GMail).
Neilsen can only dream of the kind of demographics Google could extrapolate. Google would mak ethe Neilsen ratings obsolete, because after all, it doesn't necessarily matter if a TV show is being viewed by a lot of people, what matters is if the ads being shown in it key into the demographic enough that the show is profitable. Google can *ensure* that, all Neilsen can do is make educated guesses based on the surveys it sends it families.
Most people know how overrated google has become. Why then do we keep writting about only the good things? I don't read Cringely very often, but I've never seen even him have anything really negative to say about google. What's up with this? Is it just because they put out some nifty tools that raise large amounts of privacy concerns? Is it because it was ONCE a killer search engine?
Why aren't poor search results being reported? For example, in the city of Vallejo, CA we are the only facilities based DSL provider and we even own vallejodsl.com, but up until today (which is the first time I've done this search in 2 months) we weren't even on the first 5 pages. We don't participate in the shadey SEO practices so we were shoved so far back we weren't visible even when actualy looking specifically for a vallejo based DSL provider. I've been given huge amounts of excuses for why that could be, but when 80% of the results were blackhat SEO tactics that shoved us back I could care less about them. We are a well established company (15 years in business) and there should be no reason why we should have been so low on the results. We have plenty of backlinks but google only lists like 36 while others list as many 3000. We stood in that "state" for well over 2 years regardless of what we did on our end.
I still have a hard time understanding why people are considering google the greatest thing to happen to the internet since TCP/IP. Google's core business is search, that's where it got it's start. If it can't maintain it's core, then why should we be thanking them for giving us other tools? And to be perfectly honest, google is a noun not a verb and it drives me insane when langauge gets twisted for marketing purposes and it should bother everyone else too. Being mindless is what these people count on, so why are we caving to it. Blog anyone? IT'S A WEB LOG! Calling it a blog puts a buzzword to something that's been around for a decade but someone just wanted to make money off the idea so they had to create a word that people liked saying.
Google would not be interested in the studios concept. It puts them into competition instead of controlling the interest. It also makes them have to engage in risk in an area for which they are not experts. They know how to analyse ads and determine relevance, etc. They do not create media, though, and the cost to compete is very high.
Were they to engage in that, the stock price would take a serious hit.
Linux - because it doesn't leave that Steve Ballmer aftertaste.
Who is going to film the ads? Who is going to edit the ads? Who is going to appear in the ads and do voice-overs?
With text ads, just about anybody can make one quickly and easily. With picture ads, you don't even really need to be an artist as long as you can paste a picture of your product next to some text in Photoshop. Flash ads are a bit more work, but even then, it's little more than animating and scripting a bunch of pictures and text.
But with narrowcast video ads, how are they going to look when they are filmed by amateurs? Think about stereotypical used car dealer ads from movies and go down from there. Way down. It's a brave new world, and we're going to run out of pancake makeup pretty quick.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
The number one complaint I hear on why people use Tivo (or ThePirateBay as it seems to be lately) is that advertising sucks -- it is unimportant, too generalized and the same thing over and over.
Let's say you watch 2 hours of TV each night. During that time, you will view at least 32 minutes of ads. Do you honestly think relevance has anything to do with why many people are disgusted with ads?
In theory, personalized ads could fix this. If each ad slot cost more because it was targetted, you could get away with fewer ads. However, do you honestly see the TV execs reducing the number of ads to stay at the same revenue point? No, they will keep the number of ads the same in the hope of earning more. Thus, with "Advertising 2.0", we're in the exact same spot we are now, except our privacy has been sold to whoever wants to pay.
- Tony
The proposed, targeted advertising could work for cable, but what about broadcast mediums such as over-the-air or satellite?
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In the last two years the Weather Channel has been making a big push in this direction. They have been a technological innovator in the cable world especially in the way they push the local forecast to every individual head end that carries TWC. Leveraging that technology they have begun regional targeting and weather specific targeting.
An example of this is a tire company. On any other network when they buy national time one commercial for one tire is aired. With regional targeting rain tires can been served to the northeast and good weather tires to the south - in the same :30 seconds two spots run simultaneously in different parts of the country. Take that a step further and you really begin to see the value in the premium price TWC gets for these spots.
TWC links it's ad serving to it's local forecasts at each head end. If it's raining in your county you'll see a rain tire commercial, while your buddy up north on another cable system where it's snowing will see a spot for snow tires. An hour later when the snow turns to rain he's see a spot for rain tires.
While conceptually the idea of Google leveraging these trailers is conceivable Cringely's prediction is flawed. Google will not be able to sell targeting to the networks. National network commercials are still carried over the air. Cable operators simply retransmit them. The minute or two of local time is sold by the local affiliate, also over the air and then retransmitted. Neither the nets nor the affiliates would let a cable operator insert commercials over the ones they've sold and no technology exists to legally insert them over the air interrupting the original signal. There may be some room in the cable only universe for cable MSO's to sell national advertisers more targeted spots in the 2 minutes an hour then get but the idea of Joe's Restaurant down the block spending money on production of a TV ad and then paying extra to target me seems a little far fetched.
I think the prediction in today's NY Times http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/06/technology/06onl ine.html makes more sense. Downloads an convergence of the TV and PC are where it's going to be at.
Or we could just wait and see what the announcement is. What is the point of specualting anyway besides driving traffic to /. everyday? :)
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Honestly, I wouldn't mind watching advertisements if there were less of them and they advertised stuff I would possibly buy. Stuff I would buy doesn't include tampons and new cars. It does include books, roleplaying games, video games, some movies, and stuff like that.
Also, if the cost of distributing your advertisement only to the people who would potentially buy it, like only advertising "feminin products" to women, only advertising new cars to people with a record of buying new cars every so often, and only advertising Nintendo DS games to people with Nintendo DSes (like me), everybody would win.
The cost of actually relaying your message to consumers would decrease dramatically, since most small companies could throw together an ad and display it like on Google, there would be less time spent marketing (a couple of ads instead of an ad or two appealing to each demographic) and you could still get free content.
If anything, all I want is more of a rotation of commercials during series or specifically, multi-part sports programming. Ie, I HATE having to watch the SAME commercials during the entire NBA playoffs, or March Madness, etc. They bombard you with the the whole game, EVERY GAME.
Nobody here likes being spammed online, so why is it ok on the tv ? It's exactly the same, unsolicited commercial crap.
So, explain how the ads are unsolicited when you decided to sit down in front of the t.v. and consume whatever appeared on the screen.
I guess the networks should entertain you 24/7 for free, right? Somehow the Slashdot crowd frequently thinks that media providers have an obligation to provide the world with the best quality content, free of charge (and ads). Get a clue, folks. Capitalism doesn't seem to be going away anytime soon.
The boring alternative is that they are putting up data centers to increase rundundancy and reduce lag(network hops). The fact that it, combined with owning a bunch of dark fiber, also helps them hedge against brain dead network operators attempting to charge for access, probably doesn't hurt.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Not necessarily. As you say, a lot of consumers are currently disgusted with the amount of advertising they're inundated with.
Personalized ads could stand to change the max point on the revenue curve - if you can make the same amount of money with less ads, and attract more consumers to your content *because* there are less ads, there's a net gain for the content provider. It's possible that you'd drive away more consumers by having more than two or three ads than you could hope to make up for by charging for those extra ads.
The more and more I read these articles about all of these peripheral businesses Google is getting into, the more and more I wonder if there is any cohesive strategy to the whole thing. Are Google's executives just going bonkers with all the money they have to spend? Are they just trying to grab headlines to prop up their stock price? What's next, Google brings back the Pets.com sock puppet to serve as the mascot for their new service which lets you store up to 1 Gigabyte of email on your dog's flea-collar which is connected 24/7 to their global Wifi network and enables you to zoom in on your dog via satellite photography?