24/7 Wall St.

Google (GOOG) has hooked up with TV rating service Nielsen to provide data to further target TV adds. The big search company already sells investory reaching about 12 million homes, mostly through a deal with Echostar (DISH). Google uses its internet ad targeting technology to pinpoint messages to the right households, the ones who match up best with the marketing message in the TV ad. Google can also measure the effectiveness of ads based on consumer reacations.

Getting the TV demographic data from Nielsen should only improve the Google system. According to The Wall Street Journal "using information from Nielsen, Google will help advertisers identify spots that reach specific demographic groups, and afterward track the demographics of audiences that watched their commercials."

Wall St. ought to ponder why the Google system is only being used against a universe of 12 million TV households, a small piece of the pie in the US market.

It could be that the Google technology is no good for TV. Of course, there would be some evidence of that from the advertisers who use the system now. And, Nielsen should only make those results better

Or, executives at TV networks and cable systems don’t want to lose control of selling their inventory. The Google system does not need a lot of well-dressed television executives and sales types.

Dust of the resume, you TV management people. Time to find new work.

Douglas A. McIntyre

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