I‘m at the first Local Search Summit in San Jose thanks to Steve Espinosa.
Steve Stukenborg from Google TV did a compelling keynote about how Google is entering into the TV advertising space. I didn’t realize that Google is moving into the TV advertising space in such a big way!
Big Network Partnerships
Through their partnerships with the Dish Network (14m viewers), and 12 other cable networks like MSNBC (95m viewers), Bloomberg and others they monitor 15 Billion channel changes per week. Add this to their online Google video network that includes sites like YouTube, TV Guide, AMC and Universal and they have some serious reach for their ads.
Through these partnerships, they know things like:
- How many people actually watched the commercial
- How many people watched it “timeshifted” (e.g. watched it later on a DVR)
- How many people skipped your ad!
This allows them to only charge advertisers for impressions delivered, which of course is very different from how TV advertising is done today. And they can geo-target ads too, which enables local advertising.
Democratizing TV Ad Placements
To place the ads Google is bringing the Google AdWords like interface to TV Advertising, and creating an online marketplace for them.
They overlay a TV program guide with their keyword tools. So you can search for the keywords you want, and they’ll return the shows that match them based on context so you can choose which ones you want to advertise on.
He said that he has seen decent TV ads produced for $500, and once you have the ad ready, it can be place in 1-3 days, which is revolutionary for TV advertising.
Measurement and Accountability
And they’ve even integrated TV ad stats with Google Analytics, and the Local Business Center Dashboard as well! So they can essentially close the loop and measure the effectiveness of your TV and Video ad placements; something they haven’t been able to do with audio or print advertising.
It’s interesting to imagine how much TV advertising could changed based on what Google is doing!
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Wow…thank you for your notes! I was really interested to see what google TV was going to bring to local and that is big news. Geo-targeting and tracking on the tv will be great, but what I will be excited for is when I can have my ads appear every time someone in the local town watches a video on youtube or google. That will be when I have to get my tv makeup ready! Did they give a time frame?