Google Gets Into “Addressable TV” With Visible World

Google’s TV Ads platform is getting some help from a company called Visible World, which offers demographic and geotargeted advertising across different media types. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal this morning:

Google Inc. is teaming up with Visible World Inc., a well-known New York technology company that uses software to create multiple versions of a given ad, in its push to offer TV advertisers more targeting options.

Google will combine the technology with its Google TV Ads, an automated auction-based system for buying TV ads by choosing which shows best fit the advertised product or service. The idea of such “addressable advertising” is to send a TV ad promoting a sale on minivans to a household with children, for example, and the same basic ad with a promo for a sports sedan to a childless household.

The combination will allow agencies and brands to make different versions of the same campaign to target different audiences by income, household composition, location and so on. In offline TV, Google works with EchoStar and cable operator Astound. Google TV Ads also appear online.

The cable TV industry is working on its own “addressable TV” initiative called Project Canoe. And NBC is using a Microsoft ad platform called Admira (based on its Navic acquisition) for addressable TV. There are other companies (e.g. SpotRunner) operating in the segment as well.

The effort and objective (more precise and dynamic audience targeting) is very similar to what Yahoo has been developing with the APT platform for display advertising online.