You’re liking lots of stuff on Facebook, why not “like” a commercial you see on TV? Google TV executive Mark Piesanen threw out that idea at the NATPE conference this week, explaining that technology under development by Canoe Ventures could power it. “I’d love to have Canoe-enabled ‘like’ badges, where people vote on commercials they like or dislike. That would be awesome,” he said.
MediaPost reports that Canoe is working on some kind of interactive TV feedback system, although it’s unclear if something approximating “like” buttons would play a part in it. And Piesanen didn’t say whether the idea is under development at Google TV, either.
But over at YouTube, they’re rolling out a new video ad format called “TrueView” that comes at it from another angle. As a user, you can skip a preroll ad after 5 seconds if you don’t want to watch it — in a way, you “dislike” it — and YouTube tracks which ads are skipped against certain kinds of content.
“We’re building up systems that predict who will want to view which ads. The system will reward good ads, and we’ll only serve those against your content,” explains YouTube senior product manager Phil Farhi in a video to YouTube’s content partners earlier this month. “A TrueView ad will only win if it can make you more revenue than another ad.”
In other words, letting users skip ads actually generates more money, not less, because advertisers are willing to pay more for ads that people are willing to watch. Although a little counter-intuitive at first, the YouTube experiment shows how letting people “like” or “dislike” TV ads has the potential to generate a premium in advertising revenue — not to mention, make commercials a little more palatable for viewers.