Why British Sky is Out of the Blue: Google Ads On TV
A great interview with James Murdoch (British Sky Broadcasting, or simply the Sky) from Spencer Reiss in Wired. John Battelle wrote about Google ads on TV in his book entitled Search quite a few months ago, hm, in 2005. Time is running. He emphasized Rewriting rules, Database of intentions, etc. Here’s the company that is putting it into practice with great success. The content - even on mobiles - has basically remained the same: sports and news, says Murdoch. And they are all happy about UGC, recycling it however they can. That’s what I call moving ahead. How does it apply to the US? He tells us.
Here’s an excerpt:
Wired: You’ve got an unusual deal with Google — not only online ad sales but also Sky-branded versions of Gmail and other services.
Murdoch: It goes well beyond that. We’re working together to bring Internet-style ad targeting to television.
Wired: Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that big bandwidth “changes the definition of how people use Google.” How far do you see that going?
Murdoch: Customers have essentially limitless choice. The question is no longer navigating all that content, it’s what do I do with it: time-shift it, share it, cut it up into pieces, interact with it and make it my own. Control becomes important.
Wired: PCs are already pretty good at that, no?
Murdoch: When broadband is linked to a set-top box and a wireless router — that’s built into our package — you can do a huge amount of seamless integration. The electronic program ming guide we’ve designed doesn’t distinguish between things you’ve stored to the hard disk and what’s coming through the broadcast stream. We want to deliver the whole mix.
Wired: A lot of that mix will be user-generated. Isn’t that a threat to traditional television?
Murdoch: It isn’t a threat. It’s an opportunity. Today’s user- generated content is getting big audiences. It also has great utility — Sky News is mixing in on-the-scene clips from viewer’s cell phones, for instance. … Unfortunately, the US telcos have successfully resisted opening up the local loop, which makes reaching homes far more costly. And US geography is much more challenging. The customer base is too spread out.