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.

TV? Television?

Google is so ubiquitous it seems going to TV advertising is going backward.

I know I've heard of those somewhere. I'll have to Google it and find out what it is.

Re:TV? Television?

It's the thing the Sci-Fi channel is on! And you call yourself a slashdotter...

I love Geico ads.

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.

It's so absorbant!

If this means I don't have to see any more feminine hygene product ads, go Google, go!

Most people aren't as smart as you.

Having quite a bit of marketing background, I can assure you that it's completely intentional when an ad isn't like the Geico or Apple ads you mention. The main problem with such ads is that they don't explicitly show the product enough. They work fine for an insurance ad, as insurance really isn't a tangible thing (like a bottle of beer or a particular restaurant are). When it comes to something like insurance, you're trying to get the viewer to remember the name or the logo. It's rare that one can successfully associate something memorable with the name of a firm, as in the case of a gecko with the name "Geico".

Most ads are there to appeal to the ignorant, unwashed masses. And what often works best is to show them your product over and over and over and over and over and over. Like in Gatorade commercials, which are often just a montage of many clips of sweathy athletes drinking Gatorade. The same goes for shampoo. That way the consumer will remember the appearance of the item the next time they're in a store that sells it.

Re:Most people aren't as smart as you.

Perhaps you didn't catch his first sentence, but he has a *marketing background*. Don't argue with him -- He's beyond all comprehension.

Re:I love Geico ads.

I can't really see how Google helping to create ad contect would equal the success of the Geico ads, but...

The point of my post is really that Google's ad targeting approach may lead to less ads that are better focussed, and have strong incentives to have higher qualtiy content.

Well

The overall concept is great. If commercials were 'targetted' to the particular viewer, they would be more effective and hence could either raise more revenue for television networks or allow for shorter commercial breaks.

The catch is this : I don't see what role google can have in this. They might be able to develop the technology for delivering the video cheaply and reliably using google OS and commodity PC hardware, like the rest of their systems work. This would make the back end at the cable and telecom tv providers cheaper. They could also develop the mechanism for choosing commercials ('searches' based on a users demographics) and evaluating success.

However, the profit is still in owning the pipes. How can google make money when the ownership of the network is in the hands of other : the telephone and cable companies.

Re:Well

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.

Popups

If Google can reverse the trend on some channels to move towards LARGE popups that move around and make noise on the bottom have of the screen DURING the actual show, completely ruining and interrupting it, than GREAT! Go for it!. I really hate trying to read something on the screen like a subtitle or place&time text only to have a big race car drive across it, obscuring my view and making loud tire screeching noises over a quiet/dark/moody intro scene to some show.

Quiet, text-only, to-the-point, factual advertisement is a lot more tolerable.

Re:Popups

It's also far too easily ignored. Those flashy annoying ads get your attention everytime though.

I have no problem watching ads that entertain

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...

Can anybody say "Dodge Hemi"???

viewers shouldn't have to stand for tv commercials that are a "waste of your time"

<vent>
For example, all automobile ads. Huge waste of money and my time. They show the cars out in the wild instead of sitting in traffic like most of us - they highlight features that only car-guys know what the heck it means (er, dodge hemisphere?), and the local dealer ads are headlined by guys/girls that have no shame and sound like idiots. I'm hard pressed to think of any car commercial that even has an entertainment value.

I think what really irritates me is that every 6-10 years when I buy a new car I know that a significant part of the cost is those stupid commercials.
</vent>

Aren't TV ads already targetted?

When I watch car shows, I see ads for cars and other car shows. When I watch Law and Order I see ads for Preparation H. When I watch Matlock, I see ads for adult diapers.

I don't like it.

I want to like Google, and I do love most of their products, but the power and reaches of their information gathering and processing does have me a little concerned. Not to mention their infinite data retention policies. I don't think Google would necessarily do anything "bad" with that data, but that's not the point. All it takes is one incident to affect potentially millions of people.

Cringely

Cringely has been predicting this [pbs.org] for quite a while now.

I can see this being both good and bad - we'll only get ads served to us based on subjects that we are interested in, but on the other hand we'll only get ads served to us based on subjects that we are interested in. The marketing people will be able to play on peoples insecurities a lot more efficiently.

I can also see embarassing times ahead for people who look up a lot of porn too...

Tv commercials a "waste of your time" ?

Pah! Any true geek would know that TV ITSELF is a waste of our time :)

YES!!!!

Finally, years of logging into Google and training my profile to search for porn will pay!!!

I wan't that NOW... NOW!!!! I say!!!!!

see cringely, january 2006, for details

This would be a clever bit of insight on ZDnet's part if it hadn't been exhaustively explored by Robert Cringely seven months ago [pbs.org].

Basically, by buying up bandwidth and data center capabilities everywhere, google could insert context-driven advertising into any video stream on its way to the consumer, and do it far more efficiently and effectively than the networks are capable of.

The future of ads is product insertion ...

Imagine watching Seinfeld and Jerry pulls a Coke from his refrigerator. Only, in some households he might be seen pulling a Pepsi. Developing the technology to dynamically insert products into the programming is the next logical step in advertising. We see it already, statically, with companies paying gobs of money for product insertion. Imagine instead shooting movies and programming with "generic" green-board like products, and then replacing them with images of the desired product, on a case-by-case basis. You already see some of this in baseball games. There is an ad billboard behind home plate in Fenway park. Nominally it is "green", but it gets replaced in the video stream (at the broadcaster end) with ads. It's not a huge step to move this insertion down to the DVR/cable box. This is where companies like TIVO have the inside track. Their boxes could do the insertion, under command from 'central control'. And they already know our viewing habits (not just what we watch, but when we watch it, and for how long), and our "clicking" habits.

Google the next MS?

Is it just me or is Google the next MS? It seems instead of sitting in their own little pond (Online technology) they're slowing worming their way into everything else. Maybe it is just me.. but I sure as hell don't like it and "do no evil" does not imply the next guy along the line doesn't want to be evil.

Same thing over the Internet

Disclaimer: I created WideSAN [widesan.com]

I've been working on a similar idea, except that the video is delivered over the Internet. With the WideSAN [widesan.com] system, I can already deliver video with individually customized advertising inserted effortlessly by the server. Either as a standard AVI or in browser flash video. When delivering as flash video, tracking actual commercial views is possible. The problem has been getting licensed content to distribute.

Good idea

It's certainly a very good idea if they can pull it off well. Say i'm watching The Simpsons or something with dinner - 5 tech adverts (say IBM, Dell, Intel, 1&1 and Microsoft) would be a hell of a lot more useful to me and likely most /.'ers than 5 generic adverts (Tampons, toilet paper, Audi, Budweiser, M&S). My only real concern is whether they'll be implemented in a Tivo-like manner - where if i watch one episode of Will & Grace, it assumes i'm gay and records Queer eye for the Straight Guy for me.

Anyone remember AdExact Corp?

I don't think anyone would remember, let alone know about, this company.

AdExact [archive.org] was a small company located in Waterloo, Ontario, and was founded by Stephen Basco (of the PixStream fortune [cisco.com]). The company had a product that was similar to what google is starting to talk about: targeted TV advertising.

The company eventually ran out of money and had to close down the shop.

I wonder what would have happened if they had managed to stay afloat for a few years? I also wonder what did happen to all that technology and know-how?

Ads make me blacklist companies

Almost the only time advertisements influence me are when they convince me NOT to buy from a company. If an ad is offensively loud, shrill, intrusive, or stupid, I make a note of that company. For example, when Quizno's decided that their product was best represented by a retarded mutant singing rodent, which carried the implication that you're eating... retarded mutant mice... I stopped eating there until about half a year after the last time I saw one.

Even a funny, clever ad will not make me buy something I don't want or need.

About the best an advertiser can hope for from me is to not offend me too much. It's very rare that an ad informs me of something I'm not already aware of. The only exceptions are Google's text ads, which I only see when I'm specifically looking to buy, and occasionally trailers for movies (and yet, I rarely go to see movies anymore, because of the 20 minutes of ads before the film, the shrieking babies, etc.) As far as TV goes, movie trailers make sense, but I don't see the purpose of most others. Is there anybody out there who hasn't made up their mind on Coke vs. Pepsi? Am I that unique in only reacting negatively to ads? Is the average consumer really that stupid? Oh... back to that again. Never mind.

Google TV Advertising

This is interesting, Google criticizing tv advertisers. Web advertising is how they have made all their money and I am sure people do not like google web ads. http://www.adbloggers.com/ [adbloggers.com]

I can see it now...

I'll be watching a "Lost in Space" rerun and I'll see a Google "targetted" commercial saying "Lost? Need directions? Try MapQuest.com! Ads by Goooooooogle."

Seriously, at least with the text ads you don't notice how absurd they are sometimes, but with TV ads people will just shake their heads at Google.

Commoditisation of targeted marketing.

It's us and them time.

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.

GOOGLE SEARCH!

Put your search terms directly into the search box! Put your search terms directly into the search box! Put your search terms directly into the search box!

Google mentioned in ads

Remember the days when ads used to mention their "America Online keywords"? Now a Pontiac commercial is telling the audience to "google Pontiac [searchenginewatch.com]".

Give me interesting ads and I will watch

Most ads are uninteresting or, at best, interesting the first time I see them then they get boring fast.

One of the few advantages to "individually targeted" ads is the ads can be done in series: You only see a given ad once, and you see all the ads in a sequence, in order. Granted, this has some Orwellian "all your viewing habits are belong to us" aspects to it but there is that one positive aspect, less boredom.

Misguided

For a couple of years now, television advertising has seemed, to me, as something that floats along on top of a misguided platform. This is not an attack against television itself, mind, but rather one leveled against the way in which we go about "thinking about" and "viewing" television itself. So my reaction to this news is as follows: is this a good start? Sure. However, it is doomed to ultimately fail (defined by lack of adaquate scoping, which leads to a lack of "stickiness" and inability to plant products squarely on the tip of the tongue of consumers) unless we re-examine the infrastructure of television itself.

(Yes, I'm aware that this is cagey - the full layout is something I've been tossing around in my mind for a couple of years and will hopefully submit in full before the new year.)

Google now officially sucks

It was just a matter of time I suppose.

Once that money really sinks in, things go straight to hell for the average person who now is bombarded with their marketing hype.

Arguments over California Kings in their pimped out 767. C&D letters from their lawyers to journalists to stop using the term "google." Now here come the ads..... How soon until the "Google Rose Bowl" game is aired (which is played in Google Staduim)?"

Oh well, business as usual.

I'm happy to pay, but not with my attention

If I'm watching a show, that's what I'm doing, and that's the only thing I want to be doing. I don't want compelling commercials, because it will break my train of thought in the middle of watching my show.

So if the advertisers succeed in what they are trying for (i.e., getting me to stop watching the show to buy something), I'll just have to stop watching shows.

I know content producers have to make money somehow, so charge me money already. (Oh wait, you already do...who gets their content for free over the air anymore?) If there were a $5/month option to remove all commercials from all DirecTV channels, I'd pay it. What is the advertising revenue on those channels divided by the subscribers, anyway? If networks (including cable networks) gave up their advertising revenue and charged subscribers, how much would it come to a month? Someone must know. I know I sure don't spend $5 on products advertised that I'm not going to spend on them anyway.

I have money, I don't have unlimited attention.

Relevant aside: The state fair is in town. On Tuesdays, kids get in free and rides are a dollar, so my father is taking my niece on Tuesday. You save a couple of dollars, and have to share the park with a teeming mass of screaming kids. I'd much rather go on a day where they charge twenty dollars to get in---imagine how nice and quiet it would be!

Re:pretty obvious

It's also pretty obvious that was a metaphor.