Animas Weblog

I’ve got mixed feelings after reading this ZDnet commentary about Google going after the TV ad market and hearing similar stories elsewhere. TV ads represent a huge, but diminishing and increasingly fragmented chunk of attention in the US ad market. Personalized, one-to-one advertising could improve efficiency so dramatically in this space if it’s done right, but I don’t think it can be done right yet. Here’s the high-level idea:

focused on using broadcast viewing to automatically present relevant information on a web browser…The system could keep up with users while they channel surf, presenting them with a real-time forum about a live political debate one minute and an ad-hoc chat room for a sporting event in the next. And, all of this would be done without users ever having to type or to even know the name of the program or channel being viewed.

Taking this further, we could collect snippets from the web describing the actors appearing in a movie or present maps of locales within the movie as it takes place (no matter if users are watching it as a live broadcast or as a recoded broadcast).

Google can compete for the $74B dollar ad market, but they’ve got to pull the inventory out of thin air. The $74B is being spent on ads on the TV screen, and Google’s plan does not address stealing any of that marketshare. Google is proposing to use the TV media not as ad inventory, but as a means of refining the personalized targeting of ads delivered through the web. For Google’s plan to work, TV viewers must be viewing a web browser while they are watching TV, or soon enough after to ensure the targeting of the web-based ads. At present, viewers don’t really surf the web and TV channels in simultaneously. At least not in a way that would serve as a foundation for billions in ad spend to migrate toward triggering web-based ads based on TV viewing.

Google seems to be looking for ways to encourage simultaneous viewing of TV and the web in order to create inventory (web-based ads that are sold alongside TV programming being viewed.) But so long as the ads are shown on a different device than the TV programming is viewed on (our current paradigm, and the one that Google is targeting with the technology described), this seems like it would be extremely undesirable both for Google (in communicating the value of its TV ad platform), and for hybrid Web/TV advertisers. Google’s cross-media advertising would be competing against the traditional TV ads, and the users’ attention would be split between the two, diluting the effectiveness of ads on both media. The ads cannot be coordinated between the two media without forfeiting the added value of Google’s web-based ads: superior personalized targeting. Google would be creating the kind of viewer ADHD that Seth Godin refers to when he says, “If you’re busy marketing like you’ve got my attention, you’ve already made a huge mistake.” In this role, Google would be doing favors neither for itself or its advertisers.

IPTV will come along at some point and scramble every paradigm about TV programming, advertising, consumption, control, and everything else. Perhaps Google’s TV advertising platform will be flexible and visionary enough to anticipate this volatile environment and to gain traction. Google feels they need to lead the charge by innovating in this ad market: first mover advantage, thought leadership and all that. But that might be a double-edged sword if they launch a platform that advertisers don’t adopt, or that advertisers try to adopt and get burned.