Google’s AdSense network is apparently great for something other than distributing targeted advertising across a wide swathe of Web publishers: it’s great for distributing targeted, ad-supported video across a wide swathe of Web publishers. Or, at least it should be. Its current experiment, a series of about 50 two-minute webisodes produced by “The Family Guy” creator Seth McFarlane, will put that to the test.

Why is Google getting in the business of video syndication? You could do worse than start with YouTube as a starting point. The online video behemoth has just begun to experiment with advertising formats, including overlays and adjoining text units, on YouTube. But YouTube relies on site visits and blog/site embedding for syndication. AdWords offers a way for advertisers to push video ads; it’s not too large a leap to imagine it as a platform for content producers to push their content and recoup the ad cost and then some through the same mechanism (or Google could offer the service for free to premium content producers in order to entice them to use YouTube).

Since AdWords offers demographic and geographic targeting, content producers can distribute videos to the sites that are likely to be the most receptive viewers. Advertisers interested in moving from television commercials to online speak the language of demographics and target markets more than they do engagement and calls-to-action, so this is likely a smart move by Google. Seth McFarlane is a great referenceable customer.

The series, “Cavalcade”, will be targeted for young males, and will likely display on placement-targeted AdSense publishers that have 300×250 ad units enabled. (For YieldBuild clients: as long as you have a zone at least 300×250 in size, you should conceivably be able to show it, although the targeting is left up to the advertiser at any rate).

This entry was posted on Monday, June 30th, 2008 at 6:37 pm and is filed under Online Advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.