At this year’s iTV conference, Google revealed that it has some ideas for what to do with internet television.
Here’s the thing:
It may not be making a huge impact on advertising dollars right now, but Digital Video Recorder (DVR) devices are becoming increasingly popular in the consumer market, and the number one thing that people use these DVRs for is skipping over adverts in between the segments of their favored television programs. Eventually, television advertising will have to change to remain a good investment for the advertisers. Many possible solutions have been suggested over the last few years, including the possibility of advertisements which are specialy encoded to force the audience to watch them at regular speed (much like the FBI warning on most DVD home-videos).
Google has a different suggestion. They’d like to apply the lessons they learned while revolutionizing internet advertising to television. For example: ‘Audience Fragmentation’ is what they call the practice of ads targeted at individual users based on their own hobbies and lifestyle.
They also suggest that ‘zipping’ through commercials can be a research tool for the advertizers, letting them know which commercials are being skipped by which segments of the audience, allowing them to further customize the service. The hope is to make commercial time into a time when people might actually want to pay attention to the Television.
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