The Ad Man in your Google - Sky Set Top Box

So, Sky will rebrand and onsell Google services to the Great British Public, it was announced on Wednesday. The Financial Times has a piece on it here and the Grauniad over here

But frankly yet another Old Media / New Search tie up is standard fare these days (though some people are getting excited about it implying Google is going into white labelling), and the details are fairly nebulous. Except for this one, and I quote:

The companies plan to extend the partnership to BSkyB’s core television platform, however, by replacing traditional 30-second television adverts with targeted commercials stored on hard drives in BSkyB’s set-top boxes.

Google’s AdSense technology, which brings up adverts relevant to search terms of users, would be deployed alongside BSkyB’s knowledge of its customers’ profiles and interests.

Now that is interesting. How to serve relevant online, interactive media ads (apart from the classifieds that are Google's stock in trade) has been a point of debate in the last 18 months, and getting it right will be critical.

So how will this work?

The Ads would need to be pushed down to Sky+ boxes (it will not work on a basic Sky box) using a "hidden" TV channel. The Ads will need to be tagged with some metadata, so that when you type in "Paris Hilton" or whatever, up pops the relevant Ad for you (a very nice 30 second clip of the Hilton in Paris perhaps) ?.

Sky will have a profile of its users, probably by postcode, credit card etc and some idea of what they like by the sort of deals they have, and (assuming they track this in detail) the programs they watch. In theory when they use the Skoogle services their digital footprint will be tracked and sifted, and this will trigger the Virtual Adman in your Set Top Box to pop into action with some relevant Messages from Our Sponsors.

Since the announcement, it has still not become clear if the STB infers the user profile from locally observed behaviour or if Sky "push" this information down to the box, having derived it from other sources e.g. credit card, postcode etc.

In the latter case, there's not a lot of bandwidth to play with - maybe a few 100 bytes per box.

In the former case, would the STB report this info back to the headend? It would seemingly have to, and possibly beyond.

But, when the Sky digital system was new, Sky specifically rejected claims that this would happen (and went so far as to say it was technically impossible).

Of course, way back then in the 90's most people thought they still had some privacy