Oh dear. The UK’s biggest commercial TV station today bowed to the inevitable, and announced a deal with Google that will see Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Co. handle a large portion of ITV’s online advertising through it’s AdSense application.

‘So what?’ you might ask. Well, regular BAD IDEA readers may remember that in issue five we reported on Google’s attempts to stake its claim on the advertising money that currently supports commercial television. ITV has been slow to recognise that Google has been aggressively stalking its main revenue stream in the past, but when Google overtook them as the UK’s top company for advertising revenues in the third quarter of 2007, they soon came alive to a fearsome new rival.

Now they appear to have reverted to solipsism. Has it been just two months since Michael Grade, ITV’s cigar chomping exec chairman, was downplaying Google’s threat in a comical piece of propoganda worthy of former Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf? Addressing assembled media bigwigs at the IBC Conference in Amsterdam, Grade declared himself not at all worried about the barbarians at the gates.

“Google and YouTube are just parasites. The day they start spending £1 billion a year on content is the day I start worrying.”

Grade, a creature of the long-dead television ‘golden age’ where laughable un-talents like Timmy Mallet could actually have a career, just couldn’t get his head round it. But why would Google spend £1 billion on TV content, when they can just create web applications that cream the ad-revenue generated by the companies who do?

The disturbing fact for Grade and ITV is that this process is only in it’s infancy: as Niku Banaie, now in charge of strategy and innovation of leading digital ad agency Isobar, told us last year, AdSense is just a small part of Google’s aggressive designs on TV ad spend. The next generation of Google advertising applications will be even more sophisticated, introducing a range of innovative technologies and applications that target consumers in far more social, interactive, and personal ways than a TV channel could ever hope to compete with – largely because they have their hands tied producing ‘content’, an expensive and time consuming activity that they are unfortunately compelled to do by the government.

“Once they set this up, it’s going to become difficult for traditional TV broadcasters,” Banaie said. “Sometimes you sit watching ads in a TV commercial break thinking ‘Why the fuck am I watching that? Why is that even being fed to me at this time?’ Google say this won’t happen with their online TV advertising: they’ll know more about user behaviour, the stuff you watch, and about you as a person. With targeted ads like that, it’s a no brainer for advertisers really.”

Google have already signalled their intention to move into the developing field of mobile phone advertising, and who knows what Minority Report levels of uber-personalised advertising treats they have in store (see the vid below for a sample).

So wake up Michael Grade and ITV: getting Google on-board might sound like a smart idea right now, and even placate a few anxious shareholders, but harbour no illusions: it’s YOUR milkshake that Google will be drinking in the coming years.

Posted by Jack Roberts in Creative Economy | November 28, 2008 5:22PM |