There are a number of ways to be mislead by the title, so make sure you read the first bit of this before you move on to the next story, because this is a big one. Google is going to allow folks in the AdWords program to not just bid for online ad placement, but for placement of commercials on TV (otherwise known as Old Tee Vee or Old Media or that boob tube in your living room).
This follows news from a year ago, when Google started selling radio ads through the program, and in July, when Google started selling print ads. The programs, at least from the online marketers I’ve spoken with, have received very mixed reviews. Almost universally, they think that it’s a cool and unique opportunity, but especially in the case of the radio ads, the plays they bought usually played at very off-hours and didn’t result in a favorable ROI for the price.
In an effort to combat that, Google appears to have put serious effort into making the TV ad buys a robust and stats-rich experience.
Pinny Cohen today wrote about his invitation to the TV Ads Beta program, which allows users to upload 15, 30, 45, or 60 second TV ads. The system is designed to let you see how many impressions were shown, bid on a CPM for those impressions, and schedule your advertisements by locality and time.
There also appears to be some focus-group style ratings of them, as well, that shows how long viewers watched the ad on average, and at what point the advertisement lost most viewers.
Pinny expects to see a lot more spam on TV, as a result, as well as a lot more UGC-style inexperienced advertisements showing up that show rookie mistakes and faux pas. I’m somewhat more skeptical. On the one hand, there seems to be a lot of thought put into this service above and beyond what was put into print and radio. On the other, there hasn’t been a great deal of positive response from the folks I’ve heard have used those services - and that’s a decent indicator that this won’t be a rousing success either.
User comment: By: jtprattI would personally be interested in knowing how much this costs and if it's in reach for most online marketers. If the cost is reasonable I think it would be a great opportunity for many higher level bloggers and affiliate marketings. Unfortunately - I also believe that this will breed a new level of "Video Professor" if you know what I mean...
Visit here to subscribe to these commentsUser comment: By: Pinny CohenMark, Thanks for linking to my story. Google does have some videos of success stories using their new TV ads, so that is somewhat comforting. I really think it will take time (just as it did with the Adwords text listings) for marketers to get excellent results...there will be a lot of mistakes on the way. The difference here, is print is pretty basic, but the TV ads will be seen by millions of viewers, and are likely to be in some instances basically YouTube ads they had put up before. Keep in mind a whole industry for video ads has been conjured up because of YouTube's success already. It will be interesting to watch as this develops.