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I watched a presentation back in the early aughts by Google’s then-head of ad sales, industry legend Tim Armstrong. Armstrong laid out the company’s BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal): Google would someday capture $100 billion of the trillion dollars spent globally each year by marketers on advertising and promotion.

Of course, since Google’s entire business in those days was limited to search, Armstrong acknowledged that to achieve that goal, Google would eventually need to capture a portion of TV ad dollars. That money was historically limited in the U.S. to a dozen or so substantial television broadcast and programming companies that resided at advertising’s “adult table,” one firmly ensconced in a virtually impenetrable velvet rope.

In 2006, Google bought YouTube, what was then a user-generated video sharing platform, which has grown it into one of the world’s dominant ad-supported video platforms. Last year, Alphabet, Google’s parent company, generated revenue in excess of $250 billion, virtually all from advertising -- but still generating very little revenue so far from traditional TV ad budgets.

That's no longer going to be the case. YouTube recently announced that U.S. viewers would, for the first time, be able to watch full seasons of TV shows on YouTube for free -- with ads. The lineup consists of over 4,000 shows and growing.

Google nailed it. This move allows them to capture U.S. TV ad dollars by serving up free, popular shows with 15- and 30-second ads to over 135 million U.S. users who view YouTube each month on connected TVs. Google is taking no chances on being the oddball at the TV ad party. It has been a long-term partner of both Nielsen and Comscore, and already receives more ad spend from each and every major agency holding company than any other media supplier in the world. This announcement just brought them to the helm of the TV ad table.

Of course, big tech elbowing into the TV ad business isn’t new. Amazon’s IMDb TV has been in the free, ad-supported TV world for several years --  Amazon Prime now has the NFL, its Twitch is becoming a real challenger to YouTube (particularly among video gamers) and sales of its latter two units are helmed by well-regarded former Turner exec Walker Jacobs, who knows his way well around the velvet-roped TV ad table.

There’s no question the TV ad industry has undergone enormous change over the past 10 years: connected TVs, streaming, consolidation, viewership erosion have all had big impacts. However, in my view, all of this will pale in comparison to what it will be like for television network groups to have to share their TV ad table with Google.

Watch out. More will change in the TV ad industry in the next three years than the 10 years before.

 for a detailed guide on how to unlock audiences on both linear and connected TV.

An earlier version of this blog was originally published by 

 that for the past nine months, Gannett’s USAToday.com delivered ad campaigns on websites where advertisers were not expecting them to run. Moreover, USAToday.com did not report this to advertisers transparently. Rather, it was only discovered after a researcher did some digging into ad campaign log files.

Unfortunately this happens all too often, particularly when digital publishers use impression pools to fill out the campaigns that they have sold and are delivering.

Impression pools are baskets of third-party inventory -- think long-tail ad networks -- added to campaigns to help fill out the delivery volume and bring down the overall campaign CPM, because they tend to be composed of very cheap inventory.

In impression pools, dodgy inventory is a main feature, not a bug. While it is not confirmed that it is what happened with USAToday.com, the story provides a context to resurface the issue of impression pools in advertising practice. 

Do advertisers understand exactly when and how their digital campaigns are enhanced with third-party inventory? Most probably don’t -- and, as with so many similar issues in our industry, way too many advertisers don’t want to know.

It is particularly worrisome that impression pools are already becoming a standard part of the connected TV ad world.

It’s logical that this has happened. CTV is a premium-priced ad channel that is very hot, and in which there's both considerable advertiser demand and lots of premium inventory scarcity.

Rather than patiently wait to grow inventory the old-fashioned way by investing in content, marketing and promotion, some take the shortcut of buying cheap impressions off exchanges and repackaging them in their campaigns.

Given the understaffing at many agencies and advertisers today, the focus on lowering CPMs, and the heavily fragmented distribution and delivery channels into CTV inventory, the sector is not only ripe for abuse, it's also hard to have real transparency into where all a campaign’s CTV impressions are coming from.

Just say no to impression pools. Please.


Impression pools damage long-term consumer sentiment for both the advertiser and the brand. So it's concerning that they're becoming a standard part of the connected TV ad world.

Advertisers Swim in CTV Impression Pools at Their Own Risk

I am first and foremost an optimist: I couldn’t be an entrepreneur otherwise. For me, the glass is always half full. However, I wouldn’t have survived as an entrepreneur if I didn’t have an alternative 'Plan B' for when reality turned out differently than I had hoped it would.

If you are in the world of advertising, media and technology, you have lots to be hopeful for. Schools are reopened. Businesses are back open. Ad spend is up. The stock markets have come back. Venture capital is flowing like never before. Everyone who wants a job can get a job, more time off, and a raise to boot.

According to the U.S. Labor Department, consumer prices in February were up 7.9% in 2022 over 2021, the biggest jump in 40 years, driven significantly by increases in the cost of food and gasoline. The Russian invasion of Ukraine, and its horrific atrocities, shows no signs of slowing down, and military experts and historians alike now tell us to prepare for a long, drawn-out, multiyear war. Finally, we have a global economy that is still shaken by a two-year-old pandemic that upended our supply chains, requiring companies to take much more inventory risk than they have in years past, all funded by historically cheap debt.

Inflation, at least for a short period of time, doesn’t slow down the advertising world too much. As the costs of consumer good go up, so typically do the costs of ads purchased to drive those sales. However, as the inflationary costs impact consumers’ ability to spend -- and optimism for the future -- consumer spend goes down, stores order less, factories produce less, and the next thing you know, we wake up from years and years of go-go days and find ourselves two quarters deep into a recession.

As we know, recessions are bad for economies and bad for most folks. They are especially bad for those who work in the world of advertising.

What do you do differently if a recession is in the offing? Potentially, a lot. Cash matters when things slow down. Revenue becomes scarcer. Expenses bite harder. Business plans take much longer to execute. Large, fixed cost structures can be deadly.

Who you sell to matters. Some businesses are much more resilient than others when it comes economic slowdowns. It’s much better to be selling low-cost essentials than premium brands targeted to the middle market.

Flexibility is paramount. Having time, options and control is under-appreciated when things are good; it is unbelievably valuable when things are tough.

Of course, this may be a throwback to those of us who have run companies through the Russian currency crisis of the late '90s, the bursting of the dot-com bubble, 9/11 and the Great Recession.

I’m all for believing that a recession isn’t in the offing next year. But, as I was reminded at a breakfast earlier this week, hopefulness is not a strategy. What is your recession strategy?

As the possibility of another recession looms, brands and advertisers may be especially hit hard. Weathering the storm will require a strategy based on flexibility.

How Brands and Advertisers Can Pivot If a Recession Comes

Google positions itself in the media driver's seat with an announcement of ad-supported free streaming of over 4,000 shows on YouTube.

Google Takes Aim at TV Ad Budgets With Free Shows on YouTube