Nielsen to Feed Data to Google Trial
By Linda Moss -- Multichannel News, 10/28/2007 8:00:00 PM
Nielsen Media Research will be providing Google with demographic information on exactly who is watching the TV advertising the online giant is selling for EchoStar Communications, officials said last week.
In the first step of a multi-year strategic alliance, data from Nielsen's TV-ratings panels will provide Google TV Ads with the demographic composition of audiences watching spots on EchoStar's Dish Network.
Google TV Ads is an online platform for buying, selling, measuring and delivering the commercials that the Internet company and EchoStar are testing. In April, Google and EchoStar said they were participating in a trial to use that auction system to sell local ad inventory on Dish Network.
Google is now selling advertising across 94 networks carried by Dish Network, as well as selling avails for a small operator who is also testing the ad system, Wave Cable in Walnut Creek, Calif., according to Mike Steib, director of Google TV Ads.
By combining Nielsen demographic data with aggregated set-top box data, Google wants to provide advertisers and agencies with information to help them create better commercials and maximize the return on their advertising spending.
“We have millions of set-top boxes that belong to EchoStar from which EchoStar is pulling data and is providing it to us for the Google TV Ad system: It's a lot of data points,” Steib said.
“One of the things we haven't been able to provide to our advertisers to date…[is] demographics and audience composition,” he said. “We are now going to be able to make that information available to our advertisers.”
But Rentrak, which tracks on-demand TV usage via set-top data, played down the significance of the Google-Nielsen pact.
“The reality here is that Google is simply buying demographic information from Nielsen just like any ad agency does,” Rentrak president Ken Papagan said. “Google is not in the measurement business. They're in the advertising business, and they're competing against ad agencies.”
The Google TV Ads platform, operational since May, can report second-by-second set-top data, so advertisers can evaluate the reach of an ad and only pay for actual set-top impressions.
Google is trying to expand its efforts to sell TV ad time beyond just Dish Network.
“We're actively in discussions with a number of media companies about adding inventory to our television-ad network,” Steib said.
Through its online ad-sales systems, Google believes that “by applying computer science like this, we can help make television ads more relevant to viewers,” Steib said.
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