Google, CBS drama takes new video turn

ALSO:  "Google: Hollywood vs. YouTube video games”

Google Inc. is closing in on the ten year anniversary of its founding. 

As Google matures, it experiences new business life cycle impacts. For example, Google must not only aggressively hire to meet its growth needs, it also faces the risk of losing key personnel to competitors and other constituencies. 

Case in point today: CBS Interactive has recruited a top Google exec, Patrick Keane.

Keane has been named Executive Vice President, Chief Marketing Officer at CBS Interactive. He leaves his position of Head of Advertising Sales Strategy at Google. 

Keane’s role at CBS Interactive is described as “implementing systems to market and sell its content on a growing variety of emerging media platforms and expanding the CBS roster of advertisers.”

Specifically, Keane must help CBS “monetize new inventory generated by next-generation platforms.” 

Next generation platform for CBS content? The YouTube platform perhaps?

The tables have more than turned for Keane-CBS-YouTube-Google, in many ways!

A Google search led me to a 1999 remark made by Keane while serving as Vice President, Jupiter: 

'SportsLine very quickly has proven the value of TV promotion in building a Web media business,'' says Patrick Keane, who tracks sports Web sites for Jupiter Communications. But staid CBS--''the TV network of the nearly dead,'' notes Keane--has delivered a certain kind of audience for SportsLine. Its visitors are slightly older and less affluent than ESPN.com users, according to NetRatings Inc., which in its latest survey shows free-spending Gen Xers (ages 25 to 34) accounting for 34% of ESPN.com's audience, compared with 22% for SportsLine. 

Keane’s 1999 commentary presents two key ironies: 

1) Keane has been recruited by Quincy Smith, President, CBS Interactive to become a key executive of the network Keane deemed to be “the TV network of the nearly dead.”

2) Keane touted the “value of TV promotion in building a Web media business,'' while at Jupiter, but while at Google he helped spread an opposite gospel, preaching the value of YouTube promotion in building a TV network business.

In “Google: Hollywood vs. YouTube video games” this morning I recounted the CBS-Google-YouTube drama pitting the purported promotional value of YouTube against TV network monetization requirements and copyright protection demands. 

Keane must do an about face in his new role at CBS.

As a Google exec, he towed the YouTube barter economy line. His responsibilities at CBS, however, are clearly to drive monetization.

The online video games continue, big time!