know | Future

Google has already experimented with buying blocks of space in print and then reselling it to its clients. The New York Post has an article (free registration required) describing the incipient foray into TV space planned by the everexpanding search engine giant. This is important because it represents a potential first step into a true market of TV advertising that networks have been battling for years. The last time that anybody attempted something like this was Enron in 2001 before its collapse.

You need to take the long view of this, which surely seems what Google is doing with most of its new endeavors, just check out how they have bulked up their brain trust in the last year adding people like Vint Cerf, codeveloper of TCP/IP, Kai-Fu Lee, lately head of Microsoft’s Natural Interactive division (think voice recognition) etc. So let’s engage in a little futurism ourselves, imagine this: TV ads that are contextually driven by editorial content beyond deliberate tie ins, ADWords for video. The technology exists to databank the ads and dinamically serve them just in time, even modify them, change taglines, change content. The news mentions that gas is going up once again and the top of the next ad pod is automagically commandeered by an ad for Toyota’s Prius hybrid. Now let’s go further, imagine the disruption to the status quo brought by Google allowing the ad time to be sold up to the last minute. Let that sink in for a second. Bye bye upfront, ads are now bought by Google and whomever else comes into the space to compete with them, in bulk. Demographic spread would still be important but advertisers would be able to mix their media buy with more precise targeting and more timely targeting. Makegoods may become a thing of the past because Google could dynamically change rates on the basis of actual delivered demographics. The time would also could be bought and sold dinamically up to the last moment.

I know that there are major hurdles in the way of this becoming a reality. The biggest one being the established networks who will feel, probably rightly for now, that there is no need to cooperate in such a market. But there are other ways to start, smaller specialist cable channels are not only hungrier for ads, they could also be more accomodating to any new technology to feed those ads dynamically. You could also go to the spot tv in the larger markets and make individual deals with the network affiliates who are incresingly feeling pinched by the networks. Hell, Google could even extrapolate Google Video to include their own content delivered over broadband.

This future scenario particularly resonates with me as it is the way that ad time is bought and sold in the dystopian world of Max Headroom, from whence the title of this site comes. In the Max Headroom world, ads are bought and sold in an ad stock exchange. The dominating advertiser in this world is the Zik Zak Corporation, whose motto is, you guessed it, know future