WSJ: Google Testing TV Ads

The Wall Street Journal is reporting (paid sub. required) that Google is now testing TV commercials that it sells, showing them to cable customers in Concord, California (a city best known to me as home for my mother and sister — guess I have an excuse to visit them more). Some highlights from the story […]

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The Wall Street Journal is

reporting
(paid sub. required) that Google is now testing TV commercials
that it sells, showing them to cable customers in Concord, California (a city
best known to me as home for my mother and sister — guess I have an excuse to
visit them more). Some highlights from the story (I’ve added the links):

Google since last year has been steering TV commercials to subscribers of
cable provider Astound Broadband, a unit of
WaveDivision Holdings LLC,
according to four people familiar with the matter. When
Astound’s customers watch TV, some
commercials spots they see have been sold to advertisers by Google and
delivered to the cable company so they appear in the normal breaks in
programming as other ads do….

The Concord effort, being conducted with a small group of advertisers, is
aimed at testing the computer and network infrastructure needed for Google to
broker and deliver commercials to cable systems more widely. In the test,
advertisers are buying commercial placements through an auction system, people
familiar with the matter say. But it is at an early enough stage that the buys
are being handled manually by Google salespeople, rather than through a
full-fledged automated auction like the one Google uses to sell ads online,
one of the people says.

At this stage, the commercials aren’t targeted to specific
households in Concord, which isn’t far from Google’s Northern California
headquarters, people familiar with the matter say. And the company likely
won’t on its own tap information about a specific household’s buying patterns
or other behaviors in order to choose the commercials because of the privacy
concerns, one of the people says….

A spokeswoman for WaveDivision couldn’t be reached for
comment, but an executive with Astound, which has more than 25,000
subscribers, confirmed the test with Google is taking place.

Google’s been saying for some time that it would be moving into television,
and details of
planned "scatter buys" came out last week, plus the company did say it was
experimenting with
TV ads during its earnings call last January. This is the first confirmed
implementation of any experiments, however.


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About the author

Danny Sullivan
Contributor
Danny Sullivan was a journalist and analyst who covered the digital and search marketing space from 1996 through 2017. He was also a cofounder of Third Door Media, which publishes Search Engine Land and MarTech, and produces the SMX: Search Marketing Expo and MarTech events. He retired from journalism and Third Door Media in June 2017. You can learn more about him on his personal site & blog He can also be found on Facebook and Twitter.

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