Google may try its hand at buying and selling TV ad time, reports The NY Post. Google, already working with print ads, confirmed it is considering ways to extend its ad-brokering system to television spots as well. Certainly, the complicated, research-driven model of selling TV time will be tough to change. Most sellers don't want to put their inventory in someone else's control, as well. So far, network execs have resisted most efforts to resell their ad time or allow it to be controlled by outside entities. But technology waits for no one, and buyers and planners enjoy the freedom other media allows with unlimited electronic purchasing.

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One vocal supporter of such an idea is Julie Roehm, Chrysler Group's Director of Marketing Communications. As she mentioned in RVR/TVBR's Solutions Magazine this month, regarding the television upfront: "...I do think the process by which we buy and sell is broken...I think if I were to ask you to go out and try to find any other market-driven plan in the world you wouldn't find one quite as outdated as the upfront process. It's one time of year and it's the time of year when most companies don't have a budget yet solidified for the following year. Much less having all of your strategic plans outlined (at least for our industry), completely approved and then being able to understand consumers' preferences and media consumption habits so that you can go in and buy correctly. We are forced to take some programming that we're not really interested in and then it's kind of a crapshoot whether or not the actual programming that you purchased makes it on air. So there are so many ifs and maybes and it seems to me like the process that we use today treats the space more like a commodity than anything that I've ever participated in, suggesting you're really just, in a very short period of time haggling over space. Because the actual product itself can change at any given moment and frankly it doesn't seem to benefit any of us. We have to build in cancellation rights, guarantees, and it would seem to me that if we were to treat it more in the fashion of a stock market you'd treat it like an individual stock. You'd be able to look at each individual program and say, "This has this kind of value; this has this kind of value. I'll buy it now for this amount of price." I may perhaps be wanting to buy it at a premium over what it's even being sold for today. I've been able to talk with a lot of companies who are really interested in seeing change and are advocates for change as well. I think sooner or later it's inevitable whether we fix the upfront or whether we go on to some other format that's necessitated by the evolving technology, there's going to be change. Technology now is driving people to the point where they are going to be less concerned with who the distributor is of their actual programming and more concerned with what the actual program is itself."