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Google Targets TV Advertising
mytrip writes to tell us that Google may have television advertising in the cross-hairs. CEO Eric Schmidt recently stated that viewers shouldn't have to stand for tv commercials that are a "waste of your time" and says Google is planning to deliver "targeted measurable television ads." I just hope I can still skip them with my TiVO in a couple years.
Whenever I'm skipping through ads, I always rewind if I catch a Geico ad, or an Apple ad. These ads are often more entertaining than whatever I'm watching, and I hope that google helps advertisers to create content, rather than the awful propaganda that most ads are today.
Of course, I find myself scared that, while I've never purchased car insurance myself, the first place I will look will be Geico when I turn 25 - not because I have any reason to believe they are actually a better company, but their ads have caused me to think very highly of them on a subjective level. Even knowing this, I cannot undo this manipulation.
People watch television to be entertained.
Therefore, when ads are entertaining, people watch them, and are less likely to ignore it by whatever means is convenient, be it by flipping channels, pressing mute, fast forwarding if it's prerecorded, etc...
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
It's also far too easily ignored. Those flashy annoying ads get your attention everytime though.
I keep telling myself I'm not the desperate type.
Remember that for broadcast TV (in the US at least), you're not the customer, you're the product. Advertisers are the customers. Google can make money off TV advertising the same way they do everywhere else: by making ads more successful and therefore more profitable for advertisers. That lets networks charge more for advertising space and time, and Google takes a cut of that. The profit isn't in owning the pipes, it's in owning the eyeballs.
There's also the synergy angle, i.e. Google can tightly couple TV advertising with Web advertising. "Joe just saw an ad on TV for X and started Googling for information on it five minutes later, so let's show him ads for stores in the area which sell X." Going back to what I said before, with regards to Web advertising, Google pretty much owns all the eyeballs, so this has the potential to be really profitable for them.
Some posters are groping towards what I think this is, in fact, all about. Television is currently a mass medium. It's mainly used to pump out lowest common denominator ads for LCD products. At the other end of the scale you have the hugely up-market direct mail companies that will, say, identify all the male, 30-45 bankers who just got really big annual bonuses in your catchment area, and send them your beautifully printed coffee table hardback of Ferrari pictures along with the offer of a test drive. It all derives from Lord Lever's (think Unilever)dictum "Half of what I spend on advertising is wasted, but I don't know which half." In fact, a 50% failure rate would be incredibly good in mass marketing. Google wants to commoditise targeted marketing wherever it happens, and to make targetable the marketing that is currently not targetable.
The thing is, at what point does this tip up into evil? I think there is a fairly fine line between sending me unsolicited information about something which profiling says I will be interested in, and psychological manipulation. Even paid for information - say motoring magazines - in which one would hope to find a measure of objectivity, in practice seem to say anything that will keep the advertisers happy. I am beginning to think that the downside to the Internet and mass media is that while, in theory more information is available about everything, in practice it is harder and harder to find objective information. The signal to noise ratio is actually growing smaller.
I'm particularly conscious of this because I have been trying to do something of an engineering nature recently. I won't bore you with the details, but as I have done my research I have gradually discovered that all the most readily available sources of information are, basically, lying for commercial reasons. In the end I got down to two sources of reasonably objective information.(I was eventually able to verify this by applying the actual engineering formulae to what they told me, which was how I know.) Neither publishes information (other than a contact address) on the net.
I can see that very soon we are going to need a subnet - some way of basing a network on socially arranged groups of trusted people - to provide reliable information about things. We used to have one (it was called universities) but they seem now to be overly subject to commercial forces.
Pining for the fjords
Lets look at things from this angle. Google currently logs things like what people search for, when, for how long, what they click on, etc etc etc ... But they only use this information to serve ads that are more closely relevent to the person searching.
...
... who knows?
It sounds to me like Google is going to try to put their Database and Search technology to use in a similar capacity only with TV. Anyone who has digital cable and/or sattelite television programming in their home, or even TiVo for that matter, can have their viewings logged. So Google may enter these programming companies and start logging what we watch, how often we watch it, and even what commercials we actually stop to watch instead of continueing the programming with our TiVo remote control. Then, they can serve more comercials about beer to those who stop to watch the beer commercials, etc
Of course this would go further if they can successfully match the web surfing to the TV watching. The hard part here is that how can they know that The Mother who is watching In-Home-Living is not the same person as the teenager who is searching on the internet for their cooking class in High School.
Google's pretty genious though, I'm sure they'll find a way to do that. Maybe family members will be able to "login" to their personal TiVo home and have their showtimes listed when they login, and Google can do things that way