• by David Kaplan , June 16, 2005

For television advertisers who want to keep an eye on their competition, tech company FastChannel Network has started marketing its new competitive broadcast advertising tracking system, Galileo, this week.

Galileo is part of the Needham, Mass. company's Intelligence and Control Platform for Advertising. FastChannel is billing Galileo as a software tool that will help marketers put their ad strategy in context by providing real-time awareness of competitors' broadcast ad activity across major U.S. markets. Subscribers can download detections of ads to their computer within a few minutes and can get the actual commercials that ran within several hours, said John Roland, FastChannel's president and COO.

"Galileo can help our clients respond to competitive threats, fast and fully informed," Roland said. "When designing Galileo, we looked at how legacy solutions operate, and then brought our technology and innovation to bear. We expanded the detection capabilities, dramatically improved the video capture quality, and designed a highly intelligent delivery interface to consolidate an extensive amount of data in a way that's fast and easy to manage."

The service also notes the occurrence of a particular ad and notes taglines, he added. Galileo's other main feature is Pod View--which, incidentally, has nothing to do with an iPod. Pod View charts each pod break over a given time period on any station in any market it monitored.

"For each pod position within each break, Pod View specifies the type of advertiser--i.e., personal care products, automotive, airline, etc.," Roland said. "Galileo allows advertisers to monitor whole categories such as 'automotive,' or groups such as 'passenger vehicles,' and sections such as 'premium sport coupes.' And advertisers can purchase and track only the industry segments that interest them."