- Steve McClellan

NEW YORK In a deal that buyers have been pushing for, Google TV struck an agreement last week to integrate its ad buying platform with the industry's leading transaction processor for the direct response TV industry, CoreDirect.

For Google, the deal represents another stake that the company's Internet-based TV auction platform has been able to drive into the turf of traditional TV. For DRTV buyers, it makes the process of buying spots via Google much easier to analyze.

"I've been working with both sides [GoogleTV and CoreDirect] to help them understand our needs to make this happen," said Heather Lang, vp, associate group media director at A. Eicoff, the Chicago-based direct response firm. "They've finally nailed it down and it's working."

For DRTV advertisers the Google platform provides new insights into how to craft creative messages for spots, said Lang. "Their set-top box data shows us down to the second where customers are tuning out of spots," she said. "We haven't had that kind of granularity before." And now, with the CoreDirect agreement, GoogleTV spots will flow directly into analytical software, saving enormous amounts of time, she said.

The deal comes at a time when advertisers are demanding more precise ROI metrics from their agencies and when DRTV spending is on an upswing -- up 36 percent in 2007 -- while other media segments are near flat or down. With the agreement, said Roman Alemania, media supervisor at DirectPartners, Marina del Rey, Calif., "we are starting to achieve some of our most efficient response costs in our campaigns."