Google TV Ad Marketplace Struggling

Google's foray into television advertising is an important test of whether the Internet giant can use its wildly successful system of search advertising in the biggest of media channels. While it is pursuing efforts in print and radio, TV represents the company's biggest hurdle to achieving its goal of building a broad platform for advertisers to run targeted ad campaigns, continuously changed based on metrics, across all forms of media. Unlike online, however, Google faces a struggle in television to convince wary cable operators and networks that its vision is good for them. For all its lofty talk, Google is far from achieving its goal. Its footprint is quite small, reaching just 14 million households through inventory with EchoStar's Dish Network. (Google also has a deal to run ads with a small Northern California cable company.) Desai said Google is in negotiations to gain access to more inventory, saying the company will announce a significant deal in the next few weeks that will greatly expand its reach. Google's pitch: It can allow networks to tap into Google's enormous base of hundreds of thousands of small advertisers, most of whom have never run a TV campaign. As for the cable companies, Google sees an opportunity for them to aggregate demand on niche channels that fall off the radar on their own. For now, Google is only using the data -- it measures when people turn the channel during ads -- in order to inform advertisers of ad performance. Ford, for example, could see how many people changed channels during its ad on ESPN compared with similar spots. It could also measure reaction over time to determine when creative is worn out. At some point, this "retained audience" metric will be used to determine which ads to show, much the same way that Google combines price and ad performance online in choosing ads.
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