Google TV ads debuts

UPDATE:  WHY GOOGLE TELEVISION WILL NOT MAKE MONEY

"We think a lot of the principles of the Internet can be applied to the TV business," so says Keval Desai, Google's director of product management for TV advertising, in touting a deal with EchoStar Communications Corp. to broker a portion of the ads shown to its satellite TV Dish Network 13 million subscribers, across 125 channels.

"TV is becoming more like the Web. If you think about TV, you have hundreds of networks. That's a lot of content. The audience is getting increasingly fragmented. If you're an advertiser, it's very hard for you to go and target these networks one by one. You need a scalable, automated platform," according to Desai, cited by Los Angeles Times.

As is typical of Google's offline diversification forays, an advertising revolution is being forecast by the partners involved in the television alliance: Google and EchoStar.

"We think that this will open up TV advertising to a much wider and broader array of advertisers who will use the medium surgically. For us, its an investment in the future of advertising," Michael Kelly, EchoStar executive vice president of advertising.

As is also typical of Google's much bally hooed moves to conquer the world's advertising market, the would be assault on traditional advertising begins with a limited, by invitation only test.

Google has envisaged such surgical advertising targeting before, in hyping its designs on the radio and print advertising markets. The Mountain View Goolgeplex has failed to deliver on its promises to bring to the offline advertising table a "much wider and broader array of advertisers," however.

Will TV bring Google the diversification advertising charm it needs to move beyond being a one trick, but profitable, pony? Doubtful.

In Can Google crack $74 billion TV ad market? last month I analyze Google's difficulties in penetrating into radio advertising to illustrate why Google is not destined to dominate television advertising either, despite its grandiose ambitions.

In Google's high-speed battle with Microsoft I advise Google to: "Slow down, you move to fast, you've got to make the (acquisitions) last," in the revised "Feelin' Groovy" words of Simon and Garfunkel.

Google ought to focus on seeking to realize targeted fruits of the diversification investments it has already made, rather than aiming to continue driving a growth “blizzard” of "revolutionary" initiatives. Not only do blizzards blind, they leave much financial damage in their wake.

Nevertheless, Google plows on. Google TV ads, in Google's own words:

Deliver more relevant ads to viewers and provide better reporting for advertisers
Advances in set-top-box technologies make it possible to report aggregate statistics on how many times an ad was viewed and whether it was watched through to the end. As part of this trial, we will be working with partners to use aggregate, anonymized set-top-box metrics to deliver timely and accurate viewing reports. Advertisers can use this data to understand the effectiveness of their TV ad campaigns and use this information to provide more relevant ads to viewers.

Bring more advertisers to TV and help inventory owners
With our AdWords and AdSense advertising programs we have seen the benefits of the long tail and we think we can apply these principles to help grow the TV advertising industry. Our goal is to extend the reach and visual power of this medium to include more advertisers, large and small, and help monetize more TV programming with relevant ads.

Create efficiencies in the existing model
With Google TV ads, the entire process is automated – from planning the campaign to uploading and serving the ad to reporting on its effectiveness. Like our AdWords advertising program, Google TV ads are bought using an auction model and through a single online interface that is already familiar to agencies and advertisers. Advertisers can target by demographic, daypart and channel and pay only for actual impressions delivered. Pricing is on a CPM basis. Because the entire process is automated and online, advertisers can plan their TV ad campaigns efficiently all year long. The flexibility of this model also allows advertisers to make changes to their campaigns as often and as quickly as they like.

UPDATE:  WHY GOOGLE TELEVISION WILL NOT MAKE MONEY

FOR MORE SEE:

Why Google CEO wants $74 billion television advertising business 
Google searches for TV ad dollars 
Google Television engineering targets mass TV personalization