• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, January 17, 2013

Wow, so now, at least, I know people are reading RTBlog. That’s the good news. The bad news is that now I know if I shoot from my hip, as I did by blasting Facebook’s Graph Search announcement, you’re going to shoot right back at me. There were some good comments there, and at least one outright request to rebut it. Hence Digitaria’s Samantha Afetian’s piece, opposite this editorial one today.

I’m not going to try and defend my point of view any further, except to say that I’m not sure some people really got my point (it wasn’t about the industry value of Graph Search, per se, so much as it was about the notion that it will catapult what was previously background noise into the foreground of what we focus on). Some people (me, at least) think that’s bad. Most others think it’s good. But the fact that we can have this discourse -- and let it play out in near-real-time -- I think, is very good.

Okay, so now on with today’s RTBlog, and just to play it safe, I’m going to go with something important, but (hopefully) fairly benign: some more expansion in the real-time media-buying business. Actually, you will see a fair bit of that in the next few days, including a very important story I’m working on now for tomorrow, but one significant development needs weighing in on today: The deal announced late yesterday between addressable TV advertising developer Invidi Technologies and Sony’s Gracenote music and video recognition technology division (see Wayne Friedman’s story in today’s edition of RTM Daily).

Invidi, as you may know, is backed by GroupM, and GroupM chief Irwin Gotlieb is on its board. And while it is taking it longer than I would’ve expected to deploy its real-time addressable TV advertising technology, the deal with Gracenote should accelerate its appeal with advertisers, agencies and cable and satellite operators alike, by giving them a way of linking targeted TV advertising to the ads people are watching in real-time. The idea is simple. Using Gracenote’s technology an advertiser or an agency woul know what commercials a viewer currently is watching, and could use that data as the basis of serving the most logical ad to follow it using Invidi’s addressable TV ad technology.

“We are entering a new era of television advertising, where focus and relevance rules,” Gracenote President Stephen White noted.

For my part, it offers something equally important: Real-time intelligence about what people are currently focusing on, and what’s relevant to them -- at that very moment. Those were two of the necessary ingredients that let to the development of online audience targeting, and what created the backbone for real-time audience-buying, and all the machinations that have grown from it. And I have a feeling -- no, I know for a fact, that you will begin to see, and hopefully read first in these pages, some new deals to do real-time buying of television audiences very, very soon. Stay tuned. And if you didn’t like what I wrote today, feel free to rebut that too -- in the comments field below, or as an op-ed.