Google to Announce Major Deal for TV Ad Inventory

Google says it has plans to announce a major deal in the next few weeks that will give it more television inventory, increasing its reach significantly.

Until now, Google’s tentative foray into television advertising has been limited by its lack of reach. The search giant’s footprint is restricted to EchoStar’s Dish Network and a small Northern California cable company, which means advertisers can reach only 14 million households, writes Adweek.

Google is attempting to convince cable operators that dealing with Google makes sense because it allows them to tap into Google’s base of hundreds of thousands of small advertisers who have not yet advertised on television. Cable networks can benefit because they can aggregate demand on niche channels that tend to fall through the cracks. For advertisers, the plug is that Google can gather second-by-second viewer data from set-top boxes.

While the company’s TV initiative has been slow to move, Keval Desai, program manager for Google’s TV ad efforts, is undiscouraged. “We have to prove ourselves,” he says. “With the internet, it was a nascent industry when we entered it. In TV, we’re novices in an entrenched industry.”

Like Google, Spot Runner is another company that helps advertisers run ads across more than a single network. And Microsoft recently stepped into the ring with the purchase of Navic Networks, a company that offers television advertising campaign management tools. In the meantime, cable companies themselves have pulled together to form Project Canoe, which will sell targeted ads across six cable systems. The consortium of cable operators - led by David Verklin - will have a $150 million startup budget.

Project Canoe is expected to establish a platform for the automated insertion of ads into local availabilities in national cable networks.

Television is a $77.5 billion market, according to Nielsen Monitor-Plus.