From time to time I've noted how other sports leagues, especially the NFL, have a habit of stealing good ideas from the NHL. After the NHL ran the ad where Alex Ovechkin punked Sidney Crosby with a room service order, it wasn't all that long before the NFL did more or less the same commercial with Reggie Bush and Peyton Manning.
There are other examples, but I'm sure you get the idea. But today, I'm going to suggest that it's time for the NHL to do the stealing, this time making off with a heist from professional tennis:
Tennis Channel, the only 24-hour, television-based multimedia destination dedicated to both the professional sport and tennis lifestyle, will provide a portion of its advertising inventory to Google TV Ads' system, effective immediately. The arrangement makes the network the first single-sport channel inventory partner of the three-year-old online-based television platform.
Tennis Channel will have the opportunity to develop new business through Google TV Ads' extensive client base and take part in the system's unique auction setup. Google's system makes the advertising inventory across more than 98 networks available to media buyers who are able to build national TV campaigns and track highly targeted ads right from their computers. Additionally, Google TV Ads offers second-by-second measurement and data, which Tennis Channel will apply to its ad sales efforts.
If you're a hockey fan who has access to the NHL Network, I think you know what I'm getting at here. If you even watch just 30 minutes during the day, you'll inevitably be exposed to what seems like an endless loop of network and league promos. Every cable network runs them, but it isn't too hard to notice that the NHL Network runs them a lot more often than many of their counterparts.
There's only one reason why that's the case, and that's because there's a lot of ad inventory on the network that goes unsold. That shouldn't be a shock during a period of severe economic contraction, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't do all you can to generate some sort of return on that unsold inventory, and it would seem like working with Google TV Ads would be a good idea to get that done.
Great idea, I am all for it. The second I hear the history will be made music starting up I am already searching for infomercials to watch instead. I miss more highlights than I watch just avoiding those.