Google is currently advertising for a head of national TV sales, a job needing a candidate that will build a “world-class national TV-advertising-sales team and lead the effort to both sell television solutions and shape a next-generation advertising platform.”
The job is based in New York and includes “identify[ing] key strategic initiatives for growing TV ad sales”.
Shortform: if we didn’t know it already (its been rumored before), Google is getting into the TV advertising game.
The $66 million dollar question (or should that be 137.39 billion question given Google market cap as I write this), are they mad or has Google just become so arrogant that their desire to expand has no bounds? They’re not exactly doing well in Radio at the moment, and TV is an even harder market to break into, particularly given the bulk of the US TV ad spend is purchased in bulk and in advance following “ad sweeps”. Perhaps there’s a longer term picture we don’t know about, but certainly if it smells like Yahoo! and it looks like Yahoo! it probably is a repeat of the same mistakes Yahoo made in the past, essentially trying to be all things to all people whilst failing to support their core services properly. Google became the dominant player of the back of Yahoo losing the plot, and we all know there are any number of other startups waiting in the wings to pick up Google marketshare the minute search at Google starts to suffer. One to watch.
Tags: Google
Originally posted on February 27, 2007 @ 8:06 pm