My first post about portfolio company Visible World and the future of television advertising was in October 2004 (see here). In the post, I wrote about how television advertising needed to change and how the advertisers and those with inventory had to adapt to the rising online threat and offer new technology to make their ads more targeted and measurable. Visible World has been pushing this vision for quite awhile and over the years it has built momentum through investments and relationships with Time Warner and Comcast. And just recently the company announced a deal with Google TV Ads to bring this to Google's automated auction system.
Google Inc. is teaming up with Visible World Inc., a well-known New York technology company that uses software to create multiple versions of a given ad, in its push to offer TV advertisers more targeting options.
Google will combine the technology with its Google TV Ads, an automated auction-based system for buying TV ads by choosing which shows best fit the advertised product or service. The idea of such "addressable advertising" is to send a TV ad promoting a sale on minivans to a household with children, for example, and the same basic ad with a promo for a sports sedan to a childless household.
Pioneering a new way of doing things is expensive and tough, but I am glad to see Visible World's efforts starting to pay off. A lot of companies are starting to look at the hundreds of billions spent on television advertising, and I can bet that we will see as much innovation in the next couple of years as we have seen in the last ten years in this market.
