Google Moves Further Into TV With Bloomberg

(MoneyWatch)  Two weeks after Google announced its ad deal with NBC, it has announced has a second partner, Bloomberg Television, moving the company closer to its dream of making Google TV a viable choice for media planning.

It's an interesting move by the Mountain View search giant. Bloomberg Television has 50 million subscribers, and those that are watching are flush with cash. According to a Media Research Inc. survey from 2004, 34 percent of Bloomberg viewers have a household income of $100,000, nearly twice the national average. In addition, the survey showed Bloomberg with the highest concentration of executives making purchasing decisions for their companies.

Being able to place ad inventory on Bloomberg will allow for a broader range of media buys via Google. Its earlier deal with NBC opened up inventory on Sci Fi, Oxygen, MSNBC, and CNBC among others -- all audiences that are nicely segmented and ripe for targeting, but hardly (with perhaps the exception of CNBC) high rollers. As with NBC, Bloomberg seems motivated to open up its inventory in order to get at the data Google can collect from set-top boxes due to Google's relationship with the Dish Network.
Perhaps the most interesting note from all of this comes from the LA Times write up of the deal. When contacted for comment, Michael Strieb, director of Google TV, spoke well of Project Canoe, a Comcast-led project to deliver the same type of metrics for television that Google provides currently through the Dish Network. From the LA Times article:

"We view them very favorably," Steib said. "I think the television industry and the way that ads are bought have gone without a significant application of technology for a very long time."

Could this be a hint of a future collaboration? "There is nothing I can tell you right now about a deal with Canoe," Steib said.

It's not exactly a denial. Project Canoe has the capacity to measure the viewing habits of 60 million television viewers, at least five times more than Google can currently get at. If the two were to team up, many of the issues television advertising currently faces -- lack of metrics and difficulty to prove ROI chief among them -- would be solved.