Google has launched a trial of TV ads with cable company Astound and satellite TV provide Echostar, the operator of Dish Network. Dish Network which operates nationally in U.S. is highly interactive and provides users the ability to search for programming using keywords.
TV advertising in the U.S. is worth around $50-$70 billion in annual spending, which literally dwarfs the online ad spending of $16.8 billion and that of paid search´s $7 billion. This immense potential revenue pool is what is driving Google aggressively into this market. If the company manages to stake out just a fraction of this market, the current valuation would begin to look cheap.
Google has also been making forays into radio and print newspaper advertisement. Although the radio ads received a setback specially because of the departure dMarc (a radio advertising company) founders, the print advertising experiments are doing fairly well.
Google will offer a marketplace for the auction of TV ads with minimum required bid, and will also enable vendors to make TV ads for advertisers who lack the necessary skills and resources to do so. The ads could be target on the basis of time of day, geography, and demography. Advertisers will only have to pay for actual impressions delivered.
I can easily foresee other Internet giants jumping onto TV advertisement bandwagon and chasing Google in this highly lucrative market.
Read: AdAge, Search Engine Land and Google Blogoscoped
First off, TV air time cannot be lucrative unless a company like Google is overcharging somehow or coaxing advertisers to bid-up on each other. Secondly, Google TV Ads doesn’t even answer inquiries about this “service” anymore. I tried multiple times but they don’t respond. I think they dropped the ball like they have with so many of their other experiments, like dMarc. Going instead with the dot com Cheap TV Spots which got back to me within an hour.
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