And Now Google’s Selling TV Ads

Google has long been a huge player in online advertising. Its AdWords program has practically become de rigueur on any site carrying ads, and the company is famous for making fortunes—many, many fortunes—on paid keyword-based search advertising. In 2006, Google began extending the reach of its ad platform into radio, and today the company has announced a new partnership with NBC Universal that will have the company implementing its Google TV Ads platform on NBC cable networks like Sci-Fi, Oxygen, MSNBC, and CNBC. If the deal works out, the partnership can extend to other NBC properties in the future.

"We’re extremely pleased to join forces with Google on this effort, which will help us develop better accountability and ROI metrics for our advertisers and attract an entirely new group of clients to television advertising," said NBC Universal’s president of sales and marketing Mike Pilot, in a statement. "This is another step in our commitment to trying innovative advertising approaches and testing new technologies that can help benefit our clients."

Under the deal, a portion of advertising inventory—essentially, the amount of time devoted to commercial advertising on a given channel—will be made available to Google, which will in turn offer it to the wide base of advertisers already participating in Google AdWords. NBCU and Google will also work on custom research and marketing projects using the Google TV Ads platform, including second-by-second analysis of set-top box data from DISH Network subscribers to measure ad viewing. NBCU will maintain its existing relationships with ad agencies and will be able to define the purchase of ad time on its networks. In other words, NBCU is still master of its ad inventory, and gets to determine when and how ad inventory will be made available to Google AdWords customers.

But what NBC is really salivating about here is the ability to more precisely track the effectiveness and reach of advertising. Not only does this help NBC to sell its advertising space—and command top dollar for it—it but it gives the company added insight into its viewership and what its viewers find effective. So if, one day, television advertising seems like its getting more invasive, and seems to know oddly too much about you, Google might be partly responsible.