Google's Steib Touts 'Long Tail TV'

Says ads on nets with less than 1% share are underpriced

By Andrea Morabito -- Broadcasting & Cable, 2/10/2011 3:30:23 PM

New York -- It's no news that the rise of cable and the increasing penetration of the Internet has lead to the ever-fracturing of the TV viewing audience. In a luncheon keynote at the ANA TV & Everything Video Forum Thursday, Michael Steib, director of video ads for Google, gave the roomful of advertisers his tips for getting the most bang for your advertising buck  in a multi-platform media world.

His first tip was to "spend 50 cent dollars," as in buy space on undervalued mediums. The first of these, he says, is long tail TV, networks that have less than a 1% share. Steib says these are underpriced, pointing to a statistic that the average person views 65 hours of TV per month on these long tail networks.

The second medium he sees as underpriced (unsurprisingly for a Google exec) is Internet ads, noting the $50 billion gap between time spent on the Internet and the ad spend online.

But Steib reinforced that the recall on advertising is greatest when the two mediums work in tandem. "If anyone tells you to do one or the other, you're being misled."