Google Measures Football Tune-In

There’s been relatively little buzz lately about what Google’s doing in the TV advertising space as much more attention has been going to the dealing with Yahoo and Ask, the battle with Microsoft as it rolls out more online office applications, and the debate over how its text ad revenue is doing this quarter (360i’s sister company released a report available for download here and covered in the NY Times Bits Blog that shows Google’s growth continues at a healthy clip).
Quietly, except seemingly in the information it shares with agencies, Google has reported on how much attention TV viewers paid to football games both on TV and on the web. You can find all of the analysis over at Google, but I’ll include one of the more interesting charts here.
Below, Google describes how viewers tend to watch a football game (this is excerpted – more is available at the site):

The chart below shows the total number of active televisions tuned in
to a given football game based on anonymous set-top box data. You can
see that the viewership jumps by 75-100% within the first 10 minutes of
the game. As the game continues, more people tune in. Between kickoff
and the end of the game, the total number of viewers increases by
100-200%. The little bumps along the way represent televisions tuning
away from the program during commercial breaks. You can see a
consistent, longer dip during half-time.

What all of this means is that Google’s reinforcing its value as providing real data and analysis to its TV advertisers rather than just trying to simplify the media buy itself. Ultimately, if Google can come out with enough actionable information, it may create a groundswell from the advertisers themselves rather than just by trying to get agencies to change how they buy media.