Response Magazine - December 2008

This transition led to a new title as general manager of strategic ventures. Steib is most proud of his role as a co-founder and leader of NBC Weather Plus, the first all-digital broadcast television network. “We reached more than 90 percent of the nation’s digital broadcast households, and Weather Plus became NBC’s de facto weather brand,” Steib says. “With NBC’s acquisition of The Weather Channel a few months back, it’s now part of that business.”

Steib and his team followed Weather Plus by launching NBBC — a marketplace for digital video syndication, which is now part of hulu.com. “The NBBC launch had a lot of fanfare,” he says. “It was the first time a network had worked aggressively to syndicate video online in an ad-supported way.”

How Does It Work?

Steib’s expertise in linking television content with the Web and other digital

media made the transition to head up Google TV Ads a natural fit. He joined the company in January 2007, right as TV Ads was heading into a small alpha-trial with a Walnut Creek, Calif.- based cable operator. “The test went well, and we launched with DISH in May 2007,” Steib says. For 11 months, the service was available to advertisers by invitation only, but Google TV Ads made its platform open and available to all advertisers in April.

Steib contends that the concepts behind the creation of Google TV Ads were rooted in a belief that the company’s technology capabilities could extend to television, and that television advertising’s move toward a more DR-esque methodology lended itself to increased measurement. “Google has a heritage of employing technology to make ads more relevant for consumers, and more profitable for advertisers,” Steib says. “We believed TV advertising could be improved by bringing Internet technology and its

accountability to TV.”

Steib says the idea of adding a new level of viewer measurement technology appeals everyone in the space. “There is so much unmeasured and under-measured advertising on television,” Steib contends. “The original idea was ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to use set-top boxes to measure advertising at a census level?’ Online, advertisers react quickly to measured effectiveness of ads. They are quick to observe response, understand the underlying trends and react. The TV world has not been able to move as quickly, even in DR. If Google could bring those tools for optimization from the Web to TV, creating real-time reporting on clearance, all marketers could benefit.”

But how exactly does Google TV Ads — which is touted by the company as “the first digital system for buying, selling, delivering and measuring television ads” — work? Simply, Google TV Ads allows

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