Spot Runner vs Google

The advertising world is about to evolve again. It has been  a year in the making, a lion and lamb battle with the lamb confident they will win.  The prize, television advertising dollars. 

After a year of rumors, Google started testing AdWord type ads on television with their Google TV Ads Beta. The test group included 50 top advertisers who are willing to pay a paltry $10 000 a month for the television exposure.  Eventually this program will go public using a Pay Per Impression schematic.

“Over the past months, our partnerships with DISH network and Astound Cable have scaled and we are pleased to expand our Google TV Ads program to more U.S. advertisers,” the company said in a statement.

Soon, anyone with an Internet connection will be able to buy a TV spot — on any one of 94 networks, including A&E Network, Bravo, CNBC, CNN, Discovery, ESPN, Fox News Channel and MTV — delivered to any of Dish Network customers’ 14 million set-top boxes, according to Multichannel News.

The lamb in this scenario is Spot Runner, an internet-based television ad agency who recently acquired Weblistic, a local online advertising company. “The acquisition of Weblistic will enable Spot Runner to correlate TV and online advertising with phone- and Web-based responses to provide tracking, analysis and results.” Spot Runner doesn’t appear to be worried about Google. And maybe they don’t need to be.

Their program differs from Google’s in many ways, namely in price and deliverable. Spot Runner places voice over and text on stock video footage. The price for ad creation is $500, with exact CPS depending on the region, demographic and air time but only a $1000 a week minimum buy, versus google’s $10,000 a month fee.

The question is, ‘Should small business trust their money to Spot Runner or Google?” The answer is subtle but found in news headlines already popping up on the net, ‘Google to Buy Spot Runner.’

Google is great at analytics, Spot Runner seems to be great at facilitating the buy, with that, you have to wonder, when google will just swallow up a company like Spot Runner?

As Henry Blodget put it on his blog a full year ago, “If Google’s M&A team is not already driving down to LA with truckloads of money to buy the company, they should.  And if they don’t, Microsoft or Yahoo should.”.

What has Spot Runner done? They reduced production cost from $500,000 to $500. Reduced the time needed to create online exposure from 12 months to 24 hours.  They take local businesses out of the Yellow pages and onto television, for roughly the same costs.

 “With tons of advertisers suddenly having the option to advertise on TV, we’ll see a lot more unprofessional ads, and some inevitable blunders by confused first-time advertisers,” Pinny Cohen, an Internet marketing consultant, wrote on his blog last month, that it  will also “dilute the special status of TV as being an ‘all-professional zone,’ which made it harder for people to miss watching it.”

Despite having a 98% reach, TV still feels the sharp competition from iTunes, Tivo and the like. Inevitably, TV media  will be seen as just another commodity, if it isn’t already. I guess its a question of  who is poised to carry it to that end?