Marketing.fm

Last week the Financial Times announced a partnership between British media provider BSkyB and Google. Here are the details:

The partnership will at first see Google provide its user-generated video, e-mail, search and targeted advertising tools to customers of BSkyB’s five-month-old broadband internet service…The companies plan to extend the partnership to BSkyB’s core television platform, however, by replacing traditional 30-second television adverts with targeted commercials stored on hard drives in BSkyB’s set-top boxes.

Google is looking to automate and serve television advertising. If all goes well, consumers will see ads that are more relevent to his or her needs. Advertisers will be able to spend less on media buyers and increase the effectiveness of their video advertising.

The plan makes perfect sense for Google too. For one, they will be able to test the efficacy of contextually-based video advertisements in a much smaller market: the UK. By doing this, they will be able to experiment while avoiding any negative press.

I’m not sure why there wasn’t more coverage and/or discussion of this story. Maybe because the big networks are already trying to circumvent YouTube and Google. My guess is that they will be forced to give in when Google perfects it’s application. Moreover, Google will most likely license this to the media providers and cable companies too.

Google & The Future of Television

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