Online advertising and Google TV

21/05/10 posted by Liz Niland

Although many of us spend hours at work eyes transfixed on our computer screens, if you’re anything like us, a night off at home often still involves a little (or a lot of) online action - even when the TV is on, blaring in the background.

Google know this. They know Gen-Y are the masters of media multi-tasking. They know that, while the number of people listening to the radio and reading the newspaper declines, there’ll always be people laying in front of the TV, laptop out, watching the ads on the big screen and the small screen. Perhaps then it may not be a surprise that Google are ready to take on television. Afterall, they’ve taken on just about everything else. And as TechCrunch reported, it’s “pretty clear what Google is going for. That is, the 4 billion TV users worldwide. Or rather, advertising to the 4 billion TV users worldwide.”

Introduced at this week’s Google conference, Google TV: TV meets Web. Web meets TV answers the question posed by Google themselves (in the video posted below): “If the web is so smart and our TVs are so fun to watch, why do we have to choose?” Combined with a bluetooth keyboard, Google TV is set to combine your traditional television set with a home screen, on which you can stick “links” to your favourite channels, websites, photo albums and other key items - basically as an all-encompassing house to your bookmarks.

It remains to be seen whether this will make its way below the equator to our shores but it’s definitely an important factor to consider for businesses with global interests, particularly those that use Google’s Adwords platform. With the (Chrome-browser, Flash-friendly) web on a 68cm television, the implications for advertising will be huge. Depending on the local availability and take-up of the technology, it will certainly be a massive shot in the arm for online advertising in Australia, requiring much more be brought to the table than the current extremes of subtle text-based ads and horrid flashing pop-ups.