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Google wants to serve ads for TV streams (GOOGL, GOOG)

digital ad spend vs tv ads
digital ad spend vs tv ads

BI Intelligence

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Google will provide the ad-serving technology to deliver the ads on CBS All Access’s Star Trek series, Business Insider reports.

CBS All Access is CBS’ streaming service, and currently has around 2 million subscribers. 

Google is currently partnered with more than 50 TV and entertainment companies that use its ad platform. In addition to CBS, Google is slated to deliver the ads for a number of other TV network streams including Lifetime, the CW, AMC, and Bloomberg.

The partnership with CBS is significant given the popularity of CBS as a cable network — it was one of the most viewed networks for adults aged 18-49 in 2016. It's also the latest sign of Google’s efforts to break into TV advertising, which generated roughly $67 billion in 2016.    

Here are some top reasons why Google is poised to attract TV ad spend:

  • Google can leverage its dominance in search and data on its users to attract more ad partnership deals. The search giant is able to tell networks what consumers search for on Google directly after they watch a show or an ad on the streaming platform. This is important because marketers would be able to see if their ad piqued interest among viewers and caused them to look for the product on Google. Google owned 60% of the US search market share in December 2016, making it hard for other companies to rival this value proposition.

  • Google has experience with serving video ads through its DoubleClick ad platform, likely giving it the expertise to serve video ads on digital TV. DoubleClick, is the most widely used ad platform for publishers and advertisers on the web. The platform offers YouTube video ads programmatically, meaning the company has a history of coordinating the buying and serving of targeted video ads. This can attract TV ad spend, given the similarities between serving video ads on YouTube and serving video ads on streaming services.

Google can tout its programmatic TV capabilities to onboard more networks to its own digital TV product, YouTube TV. More TV networks would provide more content to the relatively new YouTube TV and help make it more competitive in the digital TV marketplace, that early entrant Sling TV currently dominates. On the other hand, networks that joined the bundle and used Google’s programmatic TV capabilities would benefit from higher CPMs (cost per 1,000 views) and highly targeted ads, which could lead to more sales. 

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