Nielsen and Google Partner On TV Ads, Possibly More

Authored by Jay Baage on October 24, 2007 - 12:52pm.

New York & Mountain View, CA - The audience measurement company Nielsen and search giant Google (NSDQ: GOOG) announced a multi-year deal on Wednesday in which Nielsen will provide demographic data to Google's system for selling television advertising. The agreement comes after some speculation in the media about whether Google’s entry into selling television ads earlier this year will mean that the search giant would try to compete directly with Nielsen on ratings.

As part of the partnership, Google will combine the data it receives from television set top-boxes with information that Nielsen provides on viewers by gender and age.
"Based on the early feedback, we are quite optimistic this will scale very quickly," said Keval Desai, product management director at Google TV Ads to Reuters, referring to Google's television advertising system as a whole.

Google TV Ads works is an online system that aims to make buying commercial time on television more efficient, both in terms of delivering the ads and by giving advertisers more precise data on their impact among viewers.

Google's TV Ads system has access to about 14 million American homes through agreements with satellite television operator EchoStar Communications (NSDQ: DISH) and the local cable provider Astound Broadband.

Moving forward, Google and Nielsen will explore a number of other
opportunities to work together to measure online and other media. Additional details of the agreement were not disclosed.

Related Links:

http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/pressrel/20071024_tv.html

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20071024/bs_nm/google_nielsen_dc_1

http://www.nielsen.com

Also check out this interview with Scott Ross, head of marketing for Nielsen Online