As a followup to previous threads discussing Google's TV ads, I stumbled across an article on the MIT Technology Review blog today that featured an interview with Google's TV Ads unit Product Manager, Keval Desai. I'm waiting on permission to post a link to the full article. Here's the gist of it.

Can Google conquer television? Yesterday, I talked with Keval Desai, product manager for Google's TV Ads unit, and he did a pretty good job convincing me that it can.

The TV Ads interface already lets you select target shows based on audience age and gender information, which is in turn based on data from a partnership with Nielsen. But Desai told me about a partnership that will take this farther. A satellite-TV company called Echostar, working with credit-reporting company Equifax, will cross-reference shows watched (using its own data from set-top boxes) with income and buying habits (using Equifax's data). This will let Google offer shows to advertisers that will reach, for example, people with household incomes greater than $100,000. Desai stresses that all this data is made anonymous, so it certainly won't be possible to target specific households with ads.

[technologyreview.com...]

[edited by: goodroi at 2:35 pm (utc) on Nov. 24, 2008]
[edit reason] Added link [/edit]