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.

I love Geico ads.

[QuantumFTL]

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.

I have no problem watching ads that entertain

[mark-t]

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...

Re:Popups

[Durrok]

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

Re:Well

[ctr2sprt]

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.

Re:Popups

[jthill]

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

The companies that market to couch potatoes (e.g. the ones that treat TV, and want to treat the Internet, as a spam-delivery method) hate the notion. Anything that might distract their prey from its fascination with their bait provokes tactics that would make Ebling Mis proud. And the notion that they could be out-competed for eyeball-minutes by relevant and at least marginally interesting ads? It's a no-brainer: they'll buy laws.

Re:Can anybody say "Dodge Hemi"???

[thr4k4]

You seem to have missed the whole idea of "branding". Companies aren't trying to sell the car, but the idea of stuff like being able to "go beyond" (e.g. range rover campaign). This is something advertisement companies have been doing now for more than 10 years.

Re:I love Geico ads.

[QuantumFTL]

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.

Re:Well

[payndz]

The catch is this : I don't see what role google can have in this.

Because Google has your search results, whereas the best any TV network can find out is the shows you like to watch. The latter gives them a vague idea of your preferences when you sit back to watch things that are passively pushed at you, whereas the former reveals a lot about what you're actively looking for. Just think about the recent AOL search leak, which revealed more about the users than anyone thought (or feared) was possible.

Commoditisation of targeted marketing.

[Flying pig]

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.

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

[955301]

What you just described is a throwback to the pre-40's public relations mentality. Ever since Sigmond Freuds nephew Edward Bernays and a few other choice wackos came into the picture, pr and advertising has moved to propoganda instead. Go behind your audiences back and to their leaders and convince those people to endorse your product instead. That's the reasons for the sweaty athletes, or bacon entering our diet for breakfast or a myriad of things.

It's not repetition as you suggest, it's propoganda.

Re:Well

[dehvokahn]

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.

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 ... who knows?

Re:Well

[martin-boundary]

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.

What utter bollocks. There will never be less commercials on tv. If people put up with 1/3 of every show being advertising now, they'll put up with it tomorrow. So what if google or anyone can better target their ads?

Suppose that ads are more effective so any one company requires less of them for the same result. That means there's extra unused ad time which can be offered cheap to another company who wouldn't have bought an ad before. You know that people put up with 1/3 ad time no matter what, so who benefits? Google gets their cut, the TV networks get more advertisers, the original advertisers pay less for a campaign, and the new advertisers can finally afford to bleat about their own stuff.

TV viewers are not part of the equation, they're the means of production. Say if you discover a better way to milk cows, do you now stop milking them every day and give them a rest every couple of days? Why would you?

Mod parent upRe:Well

[quentin_quayle]

It has taken to the middle of this thread before someone started talking about the most interesting aspect of this topic and it's rated only a 1 so far. Give the guy some points already.

The crux of the whole thing is linking up the cable customer's TV and internet behavior. The cable company and networks don't need Google to match shows with appropriate ads; that's been done for the whole history of TV. Nor do they need Google to match viewing habits over time with ad targeting; cable companies can do that without another party in the chain.

But to go beyond this, we're talking about matching up the web (and other?) internet behavior with the TV viewing.

In the least disturbing variation it would be only Google cookie + TV logs = targeted ads on TV. But even this involves the cable company keeping track of the combination of your current IP and your TV viewing, and expoiting it.

At the extreme, imagine your TV ads being real-time tailored to what you're currently looking at online, and your internet provider continually feeding your profile plus IP combination to Google so it can serve internet ads to pages served from *your* web clicks in particular. Maybe they'll tailor search results as well as ads. Maybe linking DSL into the picture as well. So even if you refuse the Google cookie, you get tracked. Maybe someday, tailoring the content on web pages by insertions and deletions on their way to you.

All this is too Orwellian for me. I want to opt out of all the monitoring as far as possible and prevent any connection between my activity patterns in different spheres.