Where Google Is Going: Taking Over TV Advertising, Perhaps

(MoneyWatch)  Want to know where Google (GOOG) thinks it's headed? A new report from Sunlight Research, an intellectual-property market research company, offers some intriguing clues. Sunlight's analysis of 132 Google advertising patents shows that the company is increasingly interested in protecting technologies around object identification in images (including faces), and cell phone use, and correspondingly less interested in radio and print advertising.

The patents don't on their own predict where Google is going with its advertising efforts, but they do suggest where the company most wants to put up legal obstacles to potential competitors. One area: Automating the distribution and airing of TV advertising.

Google won a patent last week(pictured) allowing it to better target ads based on the location of the consumer. But Sunlight's report -- which costs $2,750 a pop and was given to BNET because the company wants publicity for a March 11 webinar -- indicates that location-based ads are merely the tip of Google's plan to continue its dominance of online advertising. The company took in $22.9 billion in ad revenue last year (by contrast, BNET's parent, CBS, took in about half that from all its revenue sources).

In addition to location ads and ads in Google maps, Sunlight identifies these areas as priorities for Google in terms of advertising patents through last year:

• Provide "text message pages" in response to receiving a text message
• Use of object/face identification/recognition for images
• Advertising in video content
• Some telephone-call or number based advertising (for example send ads based on a user's calling behavior or phone use related information)
• Activity in content distribution for mobile devices

Predictably, Google is less interested in technology areas such as radio or newspaper advertising. Google ended its experiment in providing radio and newspaper ads a year ago.

Curiously, Sunlight says, "Google continues to patent only sparingly in the area of their crawling and page ranking technologies." Until very recently, the backbone of Google's business was web search and page ranking. The most recent patents that Google has filed are to do with targeted advertising, the tracking of metrics associated with keywords, and tags and audiovisual content. (You can see how some Google ads are starting to appear as captions under videos running on YouTube.)

In addition, Google has filed for patents on image-based mobile search engines for phones with cameras and large-scale aggregating and reporting of data. One, ominously for the television business, is titled simply "Television Advertising." It appears to describe an automated system for slotting ads into TV airtime -- no humans needed. Sunlight says:

Google is usually secretive about some of its technology, so the patents are a window into the inner thoughts of the company that are sometimes not available by other means.

Related:

• Google Held Hostage: "Rev-advert" Malware Redirects Searches to Advertisers