Google is a media company – a dangerous one for conventional players. Mountain View’s next potential rival: Nielsen Media Research, the audience measurement company that has held a virtual monopoly in the sector for decades. And it shouldn’t be surpirsing. Google’s MO is information collection and research.
The convergence of the Web and television is poised to offer expansive opportunities to the wired marketer. Though at this point, what Google appears to be working on in this sector is nearly pure science fiction, we recognize that theory becomes reality much faster than it used to. Imagine being able to geo-target a TV viewer as he watches, and interact with him in real time.
Google recently won an award for a paper (PDF)on interactive television applications that wirelessly link your computer to the television. The paper explored the possibility that a laptop, or other computing device, could “hear” what’s on television and serve up social interactive programs and, most likely, contextual advertising.
Here’s how it works. Plop down on the couch with your laptop and tune into Survivor. Using an audio signature, your computer knows what you’re watching and delivers real-time information on the contestants, a chat room for fans to discuss, and an advertisement for a local camping store. The paper’s presenters say the technology only notes what’s on television and does not “overhear” conversations.
Interested yet?
From the paper’s introduction:
This paper describes mass personalization, a framework for combining mass media with a highly personalized Web-based experience. We introduce four applications for mass personalization: personalized content layers, ad hoc social communities, real-time popularity ratings and virtual media library services. Using the ambient audio originating from the television, the four applications are available with no more effort than simple television channel surfing.
Mass-media channels typically provide limited content to many people; the Web provides vast mounts of information, most of interest to few. Mass-media channels typically beget passive, largely anonymous, consumption, while the Web provides many interactive opportunities like chatting, emailing and trading. Our goal is to combine the best of both worlds: integrating the relaxing and effortless experience of mass-media content with the interactive and personalized potential of the Web, providing mass personalization
if friends of the viewer were watching the same episode of Seinfeld’ at the same time, the social application server could automatically create an online ad hoc community of these “buddies”. This
community allows members to comment on the broadcast material in real time.
In March, ZDNet expert Google spelunker Garett Rogers informed us of Google domain names like googledvr.net and googledvr.org taking up residence in Google’s long list of domain names alongside googletv.com and googlehdtv.net. Add that to the paper and a Google job posting for an Interactive TV Product Manager, and this moves from “possible” to “likely.”
Interestingly, this can provide a whole new market for Google. The company will be able not only to extend its advertising offerings, but it suddenly will be able to foray into the media measurement market – a market that has been exclusively held by Nielsen.
The rich, real-time data Google will collect and provide to television networks to base advertising prices on could obliterate Nielsen’s offerings of quarterly randomly selected household results, which are sometimes, in more rural markets, still collected via pen and paper diaries.
Google’s viewer data would involve not just what program where and how many people are most likely watching, but what, how many, why, when, where, and how everyone is watching, what they are saying about it, and which ads get the most distance.
To advertisers, that information is worth its weight in gold, and Nielsen may have met the next market blockbuster. What is the sum of search + advertising + media delivery + media measurement + *speculative* ISP? The answer is your next media powerhouse.
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