An advertising legend once complained that half the money that was spent on ads was wasted, he just didn't know which half it was. Despite the considerable threat of retaliation by deep-pocketed incumbents like Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cox Communications and Nielsen, Google is partnering with Echostar to enter the $70 Billion TV advertising market. Their plan for success involves answering the age-old "which half" question:

The EchoStar deal marks the first national test of by a pay-TV provider and Google's approach to buying and selling TV ads. Google also confirmed it is testing ads with Astound Broadband, which supplies local cable TV service to 26,000 customers in Concord, a suburb northeast of San Francisco.

The ad-buying system takes advantage of the two-way signals that many of EchoStar's 13.1 million customers have installed in their homes that measure which shows are watched when. Using Google TV Ads online system, advertisers can locate available time slots, upload video and track subsequent viewership.

The system allows ad buyers to target customers by geographic or demographic groups down to audiences as small as a dozen viewers, officials said. No information on individual viewing habits is available, only aggregate, anonymous data.

This point data measurement on viewing habits is crucial. The article rightly points out that TV cable operators "jealously guard data their cable systems generate on customer-viewing habits, seeing it as the crown jewel of what they sell to advertisers." It also points out that they often take a few weeks to get that data into the hands of corporate ad buyers. If Google has a system that can drill down to as few as 12 viewers (versus Nielsen's tens of thousands), can get the data to ad buyers in real time (versus days or weeks), and can provide information on niche audiences that Nielsen completely overlooks in its sampling, then Google stands to do more than get a slice of the current pie. Their entry and value proposition also stand to make that pie grow. As media measurement consultant Bill Harvey is quoted as saying, "once you can measure performance, advertisers are more likely to spend."