Google TV - Marketing's Missing Link?

Computers aren’t made for watching TV on, are they?  This low-level epiphany came to me the other day whilst viewing a thirty-minute show from BBC’s iPlayer on a laptop balanced on my knee. As the programme began my MacBook was a comfortable few degrees above room temperature. Twenty minutes in, however, the whirring machine felt more like a scalding cup of tea gently griddling the skin on my thighs.   Luckily, that’s all about to change as TV is sucked onto the global networked media platform, currently dominated by Search and Social.  Sony’s decision to roll the dice with everyone’s best frenemy Google, now looks like the shot from the starting pistol, with Apple and several well-funded start-ups like Roku and Boxee as the early race entrants.  For the marketing industry it's a change that offers the chance to seriously reinvent its business.  A business that’s still reeling from Silicon Valley’s realisation that global media budgets were up for grabs, rather than the Mad Men’s birthright.  The big change will be based on a very straightforward tweak in consumers' behaviour.  People will be able to merge web services and mainstream TV content on a single large screen in their living room, rather than juggling a red-hot laptop in addition to their three remotes.  Which means that when people see any type of advertising within their personalised, socially-driven schedules they will be able to drop into the brand’s virtual showroom, without leaving their armchair, let alone their living room, whilst their favourite show rolls on without interruption.  They can just click-on the in-show link and a second screen or AppStore will appear where they can read a few customer reviews, pop the brand goodies in their Amazon basket and pay with those Facebook Credits they were sent last Christmas.  Yeah, yeah, so what.  You can do all this now, right?  Interactive television has been around forever and most people combine a smartphone with the TV, rather than put up with laptop-induced skin grafts.  Well, yes.  However, as the ever-prescient Mick James once commented on this blog : ‘There is no limit to human laziness. I find this more and more when I'm online. Drag the mouse all the way up there and click it to get that free content? You must be joking. Thing weighs a ton.’  Whilst additional kit is a boon for geeks and the gadget-crazed, it’s an unwelcome pain for...

...those with busy lives.  

The change in infrastructure that’s required to merge TV and the web will be anything but trivial.  But, as ever, the really tricky rewiring will be on the balance sheets of those whose vested interests prefer Big Media’s status quo.  As the WSJ recently noted, ‘Some media executives have expressed skepticism that Google can provide a business model that would compensate for potentially cannibalizing their broadcast businesses.’   

For the marketing industry, the promise is to re-engineer its dark underbelly - the world of media metrics which drives the destination of the globe's annual $700bn dollars of media and marketing dosh.  The problem is that over time media measurement has become a version of the world that the marketing industry would like to see, rather than an accurate reflection of how consumers tick.  GRPs, OTS, TGIs, JICREGs, TVRs, GRPs and PIs promise a Mad Men fantasy where people’s behaviour is linear and easily-predicted, rather than the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party that’s the reality of content snacking in today’s networked media world.

Yes, the opportunity presented by Google TV et al, is to redefine the link between advertising and sales. Which for most brands is murky at best and avoided at worst.  By wrapping up TV, the world’s favourite entertainment medium and the web, the globe's most powerful transactional system, into a single box, the marketing industry will be able to make a clear link between its work and sales.  In this way, Networked TV, as oppose to TV Networks, could relieve the concerns of Sir Martin Sorrell, ultimate Grand Fromage of WPP, as described in his recent talks - 'I am worried about our industry's ability to articulate the case for what it does.’  By harking back to the Mad Men's Mad Man, David Ogilvy, who defined the role of the advertising business as, ‘We sell or else,’ and using technology to re-establish the commercial power of television, Big Media could turn away Silicon Valley’s tanks from its highly manicured lawns, once and for all.