Google has taken another step toward wiping Madison Avenue’s influence off the television industry by partnering with Nielsen for ratings information.
Ok, maybe it isn’t time for everyone in the mecca of advertising to start pumping résumés to the shared printers. It is, however, a lot closer to a time where the influence over the rates advertisers pay for TV placement migrates away from New York.
The next step in Google’s grand plan of organizing all the world’s information involves measuring the TV audience. Nielsen has been synonymous with TV ratings for decades; if you’ve ever had a favorite TV show canceled because the ratings weren’t very good, Nielsen was the name you vilified, them and their audience of TV watchers who defined popularity.
MediaPost revealed the news of the Google and Nielsen deal, where Google gets Nielsen’s demographic data. Those details will be paired with what Google has collected from its EchoStar and Astound Cable partners to build metrics that Google can pitch to advertisers.
As usual, Google played coy with its comments about this latest development. Mike Steib, director of Google TV Ads, spouted the usual paeans to effectiveness and relevance as motivations for these ad efforts. The unseemly topic of money never seems to come up, for some reason.
But come up it will, as Google has been chatting with what Steib referred to in the report as the top 10 advertisers on TV. If Google can deliver on TV measurables as it has for Internet advertising, and there’s no reason to think it can’t, they really could make the process of delivering ads better for advertisers and the viewers watching them.
