- Ad Age, Monday, May 24, 2010 12:13 AM
Google opened up new inventory for advertisers with Google TV, an interactive platform that collapses the wall between TV and Internet in the living room. The service, created with hardware partners
Sony, Logitech and Intel, will launch this fall on TVs, set-top boxes and Blu-ray players, says
Ad Age. "Every ad on TV has the
potential to become interactive," Google TV Technical Director Vincent Dureau said at the I/O developer conference, where the platform was announced. "Your TV content just became more interesting."
One clear winner is online video, which Google claims will be both easier to view and find on TVs. The Google property YouTube is currently working on a viewer for Google TV called "Lean Back" to
bring Web video and playlists to the large screen. NBA Digital also announced a sports-video viewer for Google TV. Thanks, in part, to this Web integration with TV, eMarketer estimates that digital
video ad spending will jump 48% this year to $1.5 billion.
Much as Google loves to tout what a wonderful idea this is for consumers, it needed to get into the TV business for
several reasons, two of the most pressing: First, to build an entertainment guide for the 21st century. Since many cable operators pay lip service to search and interactive channel guides,
someone was going to come along and improve the experience, says
BNET. And second, it needed
to
jump-start Google TV Ads. The service, which operates off the AdWords platform, partly depends set-top box data to target ads. (Dish is a partner.) Google TV puts the long-arm of Google data into
the living room, and may jump-start Google TV Ads beyond the limited number of partners that use it now.
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