Google recently announced plans to offer relevant, dynamic video ad insertion into linear TV programming with BSkyB.
In his keynote at this week's iMedia confernce, former Optimedia head Mike Drexler exhorted the advertising community to expand our models for marketing budget allocatioin. He emphasized that whether we sought engagement or simply exposure, marketers need tools that will forecast the relative performance of all media vehicles along some consistent criteria.
Drexler's vision about how media budgets get allocated and Google's vision for how TV gets purchased both assume one critical thing — that the inventory advertisers buy remains stand-alone, standard specs, inserted into content, in a way that is replicable no matter what Brands is advertising.
No argument that today that is still where the bulk of the dollars flow. However, the type of Brand-underwritten content that is most celebrated by Agencies and Marketers seem to be highly customized brand experiences. Brand experiences like www.msdewey.com or http://msn.foxsports.com/peopleready do not fit into either Google or Drexler's vision for how advertising will get done.
The full implications of this divergence are not yet apparent beyond the need for marketers to develop customized, sensitive, and fast tools to read the results of real world communications investments.
