Google is swooping in for TV advertising dollars with a slate of TV-related product releases and updates. While Google revealed these products on Tuesday during its Publisher Leadership Summit in Chicago, it will formally announce them during TV Week in mid-October.
First up are TV Content Explorer and TV Modeled Forecasting, both of which are coming to open beta later this quarter.
Content Explorer features a new interface and machine learning designed to give broadcasters revenue-related insights around their content so they can better plan and sell against their shows.
TV Modeled Forecasting is designed to give publishers an understanding of audience viewership patterns. The tool, which is an update rather than a new product, provides insights related to reach and traffic for a grouping of shows.
New features include an extended look-back window of 18 months instead of nine, which allows TV Modeled Forecasting to assess seasonal changes and cyclical patterns over a longer time period. Google is also letting pubs import offline data, which allows content owners to know if there’s a specific pattern related to a TV show. If so, that pattern can be added into Forecasting.
Additionally, Google will soon commence limited tests of a product called Audience Insight on TV Content and Programmatic Deals that delivers information about trends or reach associated with a specific show. Basically, it will let pubs sell programmatic guaranteed ads leveraging Google’s demographic data. The goal is to enable more relevant, personalized ads.
Google is also beta testing updates to Smart TV Ad Breaks, a multiyear project released last year. The tech giant is working to make the product available to buy programmatically. Pubs will be able to make either an entire ad break or a portion of it available through programmatic guaranteed, private auction or open auction.
Finally, Google is unloading two mobile-first video ad formats. Outstream video lets publishers run ads away from video content, for both in-feed and in-article, while rewarded video is a format that compensates consumers who watch a video ad all the way through with some sort of goodie in return. Both are now in open beta in DFP.
Obviously, that’s a lot of product. It’s all part of Google’s ongoing effort to fortify the TV ad platform it’s been steadily building for more than a year. In April, Google updated its DoubleClick Bid Manager DSP so it could support addressable and linear TV ad buys.
“We have a video ad-serving platform similar to what FreeWheel has with Comcast, and a video exchange similar to StickyAds or SpotX or Tremor,” said Rany Ng, Google’s director of product management for video.
She added that Google’s exchange and platform are integrated into a single platform, all with one decisioning engine, which allows it to do “some unique things” like managing channel conflicts.
But while Google is clearly making a hard push into TV – it has broadcaster clients like CBS – it also has some ground to make up. Google may be a digital ad giant, but it’s still not the first name broadcasters and video publishers necessarily think of when they’re considering a TV ad stack.
