8-O Excuse the long comment, but...<p>I'm a producer on a scrappy little TV show (local, trying to expand). This is startling, because I just finished work on a business plan today and our business model is produce show, sell ad spots direct to likely candidates, and buy airtime to increase reach.<p>I'm really not sure how I feel about this. I may be able to use it (particularly to use the pricing estimates to reverse-engineer the viewership revenue possibilities for TV show in the genre I'm producing, as well as to identify which slots are most effective - Nielsen already produces such data, but it costs a fortune), but it's also very tough on me as a producer because I don't have a network deal of any kind; furthermore it makes me much more dependent on a network owner while cutting me out of the loop completely as a content creator, strongly reinforcing the position of the distributor (not unlike how your iPhone app doesn't exist for commercial purposes if you're not in the app store). I applaud Google for automating the ad-buying process, and I presume that due to their sheer size they'll be able to secure very good terms and make profits on relatively small margins. But our existing plan of generating maybe $2m/yr in direct sponsorship sales 2 years from now is probably in the toilet, because if I were an advertiser it would probably be vastly simpler to just use this new tool and have a dashboard with analytics and so forth than to do special deals with niche content providers (like us).<p>It's not going to disrupt the TV/advertising business overnight, of course, but this is going to be the talk of the industry over the next 72 hours. I have to say I feel like I just got sucker-punched. It doesn't help that my boss is an old-school ad guy who finds Google docs mysterious.<p>(Strangely, the 'ad creation marketplace' (hook up with a producer/camera team) goes to a dead link. Mini-fail, there.)
One of Google's grand strategy is trying to be the ultimate middleman in advertising, whatever channel it is. I wouldn't be surprised if Google print ads come out. (However, Google just folded its radio operation, anyone knows why specifically? <a href="http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=140691" rel="nofollow">http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&an...</a>)<p>From a brief look, it does seem to be a lot more convenient for advertisers. I bet many small and medium-sized businesses would start advertising on TV more because of this service.<p>Does this spell doom for ad agencies? I'd love to hear informed opinion on this. Is there a different implication between ad agencies that target small- and medium-sized business and Fortune 100 corporations?
On a more general note, this has significant long-term cultural implications, which I'm surprised nobody is discussing. At relatively small cost, one could (say) place commercials at a particular time slot in a major metro for viral effect. As a silly example, imagine 750k people in NY are watching the evening when they get a 30 second message along the lines of 'the cake is a lie'.<p>Less amusing examples crop up in Gibson's <i>Neuromancer</i> (disinformation in an ersatz news format being used to cause a riot) and Vinge's <i>Rainbow's End</i> (subliminal information used to activate a preprogrammed behavior; see also <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasma_gondii" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasma_gondii</a><p>What's interesting to me is that the current commercial message pipeline has a degree of editorial oversight, albeit a weak one; automating the process subverts that to a degree (although they'll check for basic FCC compliance), which opens the possibility for both greater creativity and for abuse. I expect this will first manifest in the form of political speech, which isn't subject to normal commercial considerations and which attracts more funding than arty experimental stuff.
Google or Microsoft to acquire BlackArrow.tv in 5, 4, 3... [if this takes off]<p>Edit: Disclaimer - no relationship with Blackarrow whatsoever, just an interested observer