Google Pushes Further Into TV, Part II: BuzzSpot Launches
Following up on this morning’s post, BuzzSpot has launched today as the first company that will take advantage of Google’s new TV Ads product.
The company is being launched by Steve Espinosa, eLocalListing director of product development. As an SEM/SEO expert and frequent conference speaker, Espinosa has a good perspective on the opportunity here and has already worked with bundling online video with SEM campaign management and landing page offerings (see past write-up).
BuzzSpot will provide value in a few different ways, according to Espinosa. First, it will do the legwork of campaign management and fulfillment for SMBs that are too busy or tech averse to do it themselves. As mentioned earlier, the well-known deficiencies of SMB self provisioning will create an opportunity for companies that can fulfill these TV campaigns on their behalf.
“It’s just like a pay-per-click service. Companies like ReachLocal make [a minimum of] $500 per month to manage pay-per-click services,” says Espinosa. “This is the same thing except with TV. It helps so many people afford TV advertising and pay $200 to see how it works without the major barriers.”
Second, the company will provide targeting metrics using data Espinosa acquired from Nielsen. This will enable some of the preliminary steps to find out what demographics to target and where they are. In combination with the targeting options in Google’s dashboard, BuzzSpot claims this can allow the company to execute effective targeting for any business.
Lastly, it will provide video ad creation for free. This is similar to the online video model employed by eLocalListing and will likewise use stock footage. The stock content and the internal production capability make it possible for BuzzSpot to create video ads cheaply. For a glimpse check out a video ad it created for badonlinedates.com and the video ad it created for itself.
“We went out and got contracts with major stock footage partners, which has given us access to millions of clips of HD footage,” said Espinosa. “This includes everything from plumbers to restaurants. We can build your commercial for free.”
And since it’s a fairly new initiative for Google that will represent more time and investment going forward, the Google TV team has been very helpful. So far this has included sitting down with Espinosa to give him what he needs and develop a relationship to learn from his work as BuzzSpot grows.
“They’ve been very interested in what we’re doing so far,” he says. “I’ve been able to get a meeting with them pretty much whenever I ask.”
