14 DAY TRIAL // Google is all about advertising when it comes to making money but it's still very dependent on search ads. It's doing more than OK with those, but that's no reason not to expand. One area where Google hopes to capture market share, by providing a fresh approach and better tools to measure the impact of the ads, is TV ads. Google has now partnered with the DVR company TiVo to get access to detailed user data which it can then offer its AdWords TV Ads customers.
"Google TV Ads is focused on enabling advertisers to target and measure television advertising more effectively," Mike Steib, director of emerging platforms at Google, said. "This deal with TiVo will give advertisers access to even more anonymized viewership data, making Google's data set one of the best in the industry. Advertisers can use this data to understand which audiences and ads are most effective, which we think will ultimately lead to more relevant ads for viewers."
The deal makes it possible for Google to offer some pretty powerful tools to advertisers, but to make it even more interesting, the company is promising that the advertisers will only have to pay for the ads that are actually viewed, something that traditional TV networks can't offer through their ad networks.
Traditionally, TV ads are bought based on the ratings the shows manage to attract, but nothing guarantees that the viewers sit through the ads as well. Without, any other option, advertisers would pay up and hope for the best. With the advent of TiVo and similar devices which make it easy to skip through the ads, advertisers were feeling even more uncomfortable with their positions.
So, here comes Google, which not only offers advertisers a way of knowing exactly just how may people watch their ads, but also bills them for the actual views. Up till now, Google has had a deal with satellite TV provider EchoStar to sell ads over its Dish Network, but also to retrieve viewer data. The new deal greatly expands the amount of data available to Google. "In general, the feeling is that TV needs more accountability for the audience it is delivering to advertisers," Todd Juenger, VP of TiVo's audience research business, said. "Right now, TV is kind of fuzzy. It is such a powerful medium, but it suffers from a lack of tools to measure its impact. We help to provide those tools.”