What’s equally awesome and irritating in the AdWeek article are the quotes from all manner of old guard TV folks and their hand maidens. They point to the newish effort by cable agencies to join forces to provide the form of online market and measurability for TV that Google is offering. The problem is, it doesn’t matter how great Project Canoe is which is actually what it is code named – a good deal for futuristic nomenclature – they have got a grand total of zero advertisers on board. Whereas, Google has lots of of thousands of sellers logging into their system every day.
Ultimately, efficient markets will win. It’s as inexorable as water flowing to a degree of least resistance. Even Forrester is ignoring the eventuality of Google getting an enormous foothold in the traditional media buying space, as analyst David Graves was quoted “It seems that the television institution, both buyers and sellers, are prone to want to buy it person to person. ” Not for long, and when Google opens up the billions of dollars in spot TV earnings pent up in the mouse clicks in their PPC user base, watch how briskly those “head to head” advocates start learning how to buy and sell remotely.