We don’t want to pick on Google–almost everyone else in the interactive advertising business has similar goals regarding unleashing new media to promote marketing. But Google’s evolution as a powerful force shaping the future of media requires attention and public debate. Here’s an excerpt from Online Media Daily covering what a “Google TV Ad” exec said to industry honchos last week [our emphasis]: “THE FUTURE OF TV ADVERTISING will probably be a lot like current state of the online advertising: aggregated advertising networks, behavioral targeting, and automated buying systems enabling small, “long-tail” advertisers to compete alongside the TV industry’s biggest marketers and agencies… “We have built technology and have an infrastructure that the industry can use to connect all those hundreds of thousands of advertisers with all the permutations that come,” Mike Steib, director of Google TV Ads, said in the search giant’s latest pitch to the TV industry that it can help it unlock underutilized, under-measured and undervalued advertising inventory, especially millions of local cable advertising avails that have become the ghetto of the TV advertising marketplace.
By aggregating the disparate local cable advertising in ways that deliver meaningful sub-segments of viewers, Steib said Google TV ads program is able to create audience mixes that likely would have higher advertising value than their remnant avails currently have on their own, and which theoretically could compete in value with some of the TV industry’s most premium network TV inventory.
“There’s all these opportunities to drive sell out,” he said, “much, much closer to 100% and to take the CPMs up significantly when you start matching the right advertising with the right audiences.”
And, as the late Kurt Vonnegut Jr. might say, so it goes.
