Program Partners: Google TV Ads: The Final Frontier? - David Hutchinson - MediaBizBloggers

amp160Google already has an obvious advantage with its billion dollars of Ad Words cash But it also enjoys a number of other less obvious advantages in extending that brand and methodology to televisionCable Television Sure Google TV Ads is only operating within the medium of cable television and satellite versus the sexier richer world of quotbroadcastquot television But ad dollars to broadcast are falling while ad dollars to the more targeted and measurable world of cable television are increasing Source TVBMagna 2010 Est In fact the way broadcast television is going eg ComcastNBC it wouldn39t be surprising if all television channels someday became quotcablequot channelsThe Internet Protocol In June of 2009 television officially went digital Technically speaking television is now as measurable as any other binary data flowing through any digital network or device As the lines between subscription and adsupported media continue to blend and blur the megamedium of TCPIP will prevail amp8211 further accelerating the parity between TV and quotthe Webquot a medium which has already become synonymous with GoogleSet Top Boxes Virtually every home worth measuring in America has a cable settop box and Google has quietly managed to coordinate millions of these mini edgeservers into a quotTV samplequot rivaling any people meter deployment Google records whether a show has been played and whether a commercial spot of five seconds or more has been viewed Those results are then sent back to the Google quothead endquot within 24 hours after the spot has been integrated and run allowing advertisers to quickly gauge the efficacy of their campaigns amp8211 allowing any adjustments to the flighting of those campaigns to be made the next dayGoogle Analytics Any media executive who39s not been living under a rock for the past five years knows how powerful and universal Google Analytics has become as a media measurement tool for not only measuring Web traffic to a site but for using the insights from the data to quottunequot future campaignsGoogle TV Ads ties directly into Google Analytics not only providing a familiar metrics dashboard for digital marketing executives but a valuable opportunity to see how activity on one platform can influence the other Imagine the world39s two most powerful media TV and the Web measured through a common interfaceDG FastChannel Not many people caught the announcement last summer describing Google39s partnership with this nimble company out of Texas Unbeknownst to many DG manages 90 of the TV commercials around the country over high speed fiber optic networks for integration into TV shows at every level national local syndication etc In short it39s DG that tees up the commercials that are made available through the Google TV Ads platform and get integrated into shows networks and daypartsStandards Over the past eight years the Association of American Advertising Agencies the 4As the Association of National Advertisers ANA all of the major media companies and over 800 advertisers including 70 of the top advertisers in the US have signed up for an industry standard coding and metadata platform for the identification and tracking of advertising across all media including TV commercials known as quotAdIDquot This 12 character alphanumeric identifier and its associated metadata allows advertisers broadcasters and any other stakeholder to not only track their ads but do so across any digital platform Needless to say Google has already incorporated AdID into its TV asset management and tracking systemsMetrics One of the many important features of Google TV Ads is that the price of a spot is determined on a cost per thousand basis and its demographic profiles are already familiar to TV planners and buyers Ex Men 1849 Women 2554 This not only allows media buyers of Google TV Ads to speak the language of quotreach and frequencyquot as frustrating as that metric has become to the next generation of media and marketing executives it also allows those same buyers to determine what they can or should pay for a spot based on their own internal ROI calculations the current justification for paying or not paying certain prices for online keywords This quotbilingualquot world where the performance based metrics of costperclick meets the brand based metrics of costperthousand is another compelling aspect of Google TVs value propositionInnovation Due to the perfect storm of decimalized TV ratings escalating Nielsen costs to measure those ratings and a universal frustration with Nielsen39s inability to effectively measure crossplatform audiences the Coalition for Innovation in Media Measurement CIMM was formed in 2009 However given the moving parts and quotdotsquot that Google seems to have already connected could this think tank on steroids hope to affect any real technology standards metrics or deployments that aren39t already represented by GoogleAnd let39s be honest while universal agreement on quothorizontalquot measurement standards like reach and frequency through a common currency like Nielsen is vital to the TV economy true ROI ultimately can only be determined by individual advertisers based on their own quotverticalquot drilldown across all media Advertisers are effectively recontextualizing the value of television within a larger portfolio of brand communications and metricsSure such performance based media buying systems may only be appropriate for direct response advertisers on cable leaving the less measurable quotbrand buysquot to frolic in the magical grey area of positioning association and good will that broadcast television has become No doubt there will always be an important role for the big broadcast brand buy even in our highly measurable digital future But it is only a matter of time until Google folds even broadcast television into its profoundly powerful TV crossTV platform All the while it will be adding billions of new dollars from quotnontraditionalquot TV advertisers to the mix increasing pressure on inventory and causing prices for premium inventory to rise By this time an auction based system like the ones provided by Google might be the only way to manage such a megamedia exchange But maybe it39s too early to tellDavid Hutchinson is Senior Vice President of Operations and New Media for Program Partners He can be reached at hutchprogrampartnerscom

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Program Partners: Google TV Ads: The Final Frontier? - David Hutchinson - MediaBizBloggers

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