Description

Google is playing an increasing important role as a paid media platform for entertainment companies seeking bigger viewership and cable subscriptions, says Dan Taylor who heads East Coast Media and Entertainment for Google. Recently, as part of promotional deal with Showtime, Google's YouTube streamed the first episode of the "C Word." In this interview, Taylor explains how Google works with television networks through search, display and various promotions.

Transcript

How Google Acts as a TV Guide The first thing we’re trying to do with television networks is let them understand what's going on in the ecosystem online with regard to their brands. Usually we start with search where we have a treasure trail of data coming in, seeing what people are searching for. And if you start with presumption that what people search for is a barometer of awareness or a barometer of there own channel or offline marketing efforts, it’s a great place to start. So, you can say, “Okay. Well, we've got a little bit of buzz going for this particular show or there's no activity going on for a particular program.” Then you can make your decisions early on about which ones might have legs digitally or just overall. And you can do that in the search base as well as through your online videos. So, you kind of see some content early on YouTube. See if it’s starting to get some buzz, starting to get some comments, starting to get shared or if people are watching half of the clip and then they're dropping off. You can really start to have kind of your real time focus group there. Showtime in particular is very interested in having its content sample because it’s a pay channel. It’s not something someone can just stumble upon. They have to make a decision to subscribe. So, most recently, they did a promotion with us on YouTube on their homepage where they broadcast the entire first episode of the series. And that really kind of enabled a lot of people who wouldn’t have sampled that content. Otherwise, they're sitting and they're watching. From a search as well as from a YouTube perspective, television networks have great content. And to the degree that Google can provide a utility to let people find great content online. It’s very important to us that our content creators make their content available or at least discoverable online even if it’s actually viewed and it’s entirely offline. We want to make sure that we’re providing that service so that if someone searches for a television network, when someone searches for the name of a show, that we can get them either a sample of the content they're trying to watch in the ID of YouTube or find out when the show is on. So, when you conduct a search on Google right now for any given television program, you may get some great organic results. Let’s say it’s Lost, for example. That’s not serious. It’s on the air presently. But you’ll see information about fan pages. You’ll see Wikipedia. You’ll see a Facebook fan page. And of course, you’ll see the ABC homepage as well and a place to go to find that content about that. If they’re in season, what you wouldn’t usually find is when it’s on in that search engine result page. And so, what we’re really trying to work with marketers on is that if you’ve got one opportunity, someone has taken the time to search for your brand online, it means they're trying to find something out. We believe in the case of television networks that they want to know when it’s on. And if we can deliver that messaging as quickly as possible to that person then we've done our job.