Who counts the audience?

Google is considering bringing its TV advertising service, now being tested in the US, to the British market. It would be its first entry into so-called offline advertising this side of the Atlantic.

The Google TV Ads service takes information from set-top boxes to calculate how many people are watching which ads. The platform is built on Google's successful AdWords service, which allows advertisers to "purchase" keywords which, when searched for by Google users, will also bring up that advertiser's advert.

The data from the Echostar trials is being compiled and put in a usable form by engineers in Google's London office.

Sky has a long-term partnership with Google under which the latter provides the search feature on Sky.com and email for Sky broadband customers.

Sky sees the more than 3 million people who have a Sky+ personal video recorder set-top box (about a third of its users) as an obvious test bed for such technology.

Google TV Ads is one of several ways in which the company is getting involved in offline advertising. It is also working with US newspaper groups and local advertisers to help small and medium-sized firms place adverts in newspapers.

Writes the Guardian

Esther Dyson wrote in the WSJ about The Coming Ad Revolution

While the big news in the online world focuses on Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, a more profound revolution is taking place on the online social networks: The discussion about privacy is changing as users take control over their own online data. While they spread their Web presence, these users are not looking for privacy, but for recognition as individuals -- whether by friends or vendors. This will eventually change the whole world of advertising.

The current online-advertising model will become less effective, even as it gets increasingly sophisticated. New players are emerging to devalue the spaces that the ad giants are currently fighting over. Companies you've never heard of called NebuAd – Project Rialto – Phorm , Frontporch and Adzilla are pitching tools to Internet service providers that will enable them to track users and show them relevant ads. This approach (called behavioral targeting and already in service by ad networks that track users through so-called tracking cookies) undercuts traditional online publishers, who employ content to lure users and to sell adjacent ads. Now, the ISPs can sell advertisers direct access to the same users.

And of course there is the Social Marketing Intelligence company – Xtract Their output is “refined social intelligence” that enables its clients to significantly enhance the marketing function by being able to identify the right individual and also the right audience for delivery of the right commercial message at the appropriate time.

This transforms marketing capability from being imprecise - Cost Per Thousands. Eg. We don’t really know our audience to - a precision based, predictive model that does know its audience and the individuals within that audience - Cost Per Relevant Audience.