In a landmark deal that underscores the seismic changes taking place in the television business, Google and the Nielsen Co. have joined forces in a strategic partnership that will provide demographic data from the ratings company to the world’s biggest search engine as it marches forward as a TV player.
Under the deal, Google has begun integrating Nielsen into its TV ad auction system, launched in May with EchoStar. The system lets advertisers buy ads on EchoStar across various cable networks and tweak their inventory in real time based on their performance.
So far, data from that trial has been limited to household impression information from EchoStar’s set-top boxes.
The Nielsen integration will allow Google to marry that household data with demographic data to provide more detailed reports to advertisers, said Michael Steib, director of Google TV Ads.
“We are going to build an ad network for television and it’s going to work,” he declared. “In the TV space we can be a real asset in augmenting the usual sales process. All the things that happen today, like sales guys getting together and coming up with integrated packages, doesn’t go away and it doesn’t get automated, but then there is this slice of activity in the TV space that we can help.”
Google has run more than 100,000 spots since the test began. The Nielsen partnership builds on the early work Google has done because it helps make the ads more relevant. Advertisers can shift their dollars and change their buys on the fly based on second-by-second reports on ad viewing.
In Nielsen’s national sample of about 13,000 homes, close to 1,500 of those are EchoStar homes, said Dave Thomas, president of media client services at Nielsen. Nielsen will apply its methodology to its sample mix and layer its data on top of the results from Google and EchoStar, he said.