Mele’s Musings

Google TV. Meh.

Let me be the first to say that I believe video advertising, in whatever form it eventually takes, is going to be a huge deal. I am a firm believer that addressable video on our televisions and interactive video on our PCs and handheld devices are the coming wave, and that advertisers who can figure out how to take advantage of those platforms will have a huge advantage.

I am also a firm believer that the way we consume media will continue to adjust, and how we access it will adjust as well.  We will be able to get video and audio entertainment from many different places, and we will be able to access it on any device.   How that pans out is anyone’ guess, but there are a lot smarter people who are working on solving it.

In the midst of this, Google has announced its upcoming Google TV platform.  So far, my feelings about it are pretty mixed.  Recently, Bloomberg Businessweek published an article proclaiming that Advertisers are warm to Google TV. I am not so sure.

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Let’s talk first about the “killer app” of Google TV: search.  In my opinion, search on the TV is dead on arrival.  People do not, and will not search on their TVs, at least not in the way they search for content on the web.  Sorry, Google.  You have to find a new trick.

 Searching is just not how people find content on TV, and it’s not the type of experience that the TV was built for.  Oh, sure, they’ll search for specific movies and home videos from time to time, or for their favorite show from time to time.  But in general, people channel surf on TV, they don’t search.  The flip through channels to find something of interest.  They know what channel a specific show is on, or they look through the channel guide to find it.  They don’t search in the same way that you look for “best fried chicken recipe” on your PC.

In fact, my TV interface already has search.  And it’s pretty good at finding upcoming shows based on my search.  The problem is that I rarely ever use it, and almost never see anyone else using it.  Because that is not the interface the TV is built around.

When we look for a program or movie to watch as a family, we don’t “search” in the way you search on the internet.  Think about going into a Blockbuster Store.  What do you do?  You scan the new release wall to see if there is something of interest, with the hope that you will discover something interesting.  Oh, sure, sometimes you walk in knowing what you want, but most of the time you don’t.  When my family and I are looking through the on demand movies via our cable company, we do it via discovery, not search.  We scan the options and make a decision. 

Now, let’s talk about the next killer app: telescoping.  Imagine this – you’re watching a show and an ad comes on for Old Navy’s new fall line of clothes.  So you grab your remote device that has a cursor and keyboard on it, and you open up a Google search bar to type in Old Navy, you find the web site via your TV and begin to shop for clothes, all while your family is watching AND you are time shifting your show.  RIGHT.  No way.

Sorry, I just can’t see the day when people will, en masse, interrupt their viewing on the TV to search and surf.  And hasn’t this already been tried before and failed? 

Michael Gartenberg at Engadget pretty much sums up my thoughts on the subject:

The problem is the TV is not just another connected screen — the TV is the largest screen in the home, and it’s optimized for passive viewing of content as a shared experience. Research has shown time and time again that consumers don’t want the whole internet on their TVs. Consumers simply don’t want Gmail or Twitter or the “whole” web on the TV.

So, if Google thinks that it’s going to corner the market on TV advertising by creating a ton of revenue from searches on the TV screen, I think it is going to miss big time.  People don’t want to search or click on TV ads.  They want to consume passively.  I just don’t think that changes much.

Now, there are some aspects to addressable TV advertising that I think are revolutionary.  The first is the ability to actually measure if people are watching a commercial or not.  The beauty of TV as it becomes more and more digital is that we can know how many people actually watched a commercial, and finally be free of the shackles of the GRP and TRP estimates.  We know that people skip commercials, surf through them, etc.  Now, we will be able to actually tell.  And, we may be able to create a system where we only pay for those ads that people actually watch.  And we can actually optimize out of TV placements that are working on the fly, rather than after wasting a bunch of ads and getting a make-good.

The second is that TV ads will be able to be personalized at a level that to this point has been impossible.  The best that we could do is target either by show or by market.  These are very, very blunt tools for targeting.  But because digital TV allows us to know the actual box that the video is sent to, we can being targeting at the household level.  How personalized this becomes is anyone’s guess, but the reduction in waste may be significant.

This will revolutionize media planning and buying.  The efficiencies of bulk buying will be superseded by the efficiencies of precision and flexibility.  As I wrote about in our Outlook Report, flexibility trumps pricing in the long run.  When buying becomes more precise, the need to buy in bulk goes down (it never really goes away, however), and the impact of each dollar spent and each ad seen becomes greater.  As advertising becomes more relevant and more targeted, its effectiveness will increase.

I realize that we will have to take a wait and see approach with Google TV.  It is possible that I will be wrong and that people will start being more interactive with their TV sets.   But when I think about whether or not it will play in Peoria .

What I am sure about is that people will begin to source the content that plays on their TV from many different places, and whoever can win that race will win big. 

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