More evidence that Google is taking over the world: In addition to announcing plans to build an interactive map of Earth’s oceans, the Internet giant also unveiled Google TV Ads on the tried and trusted AdWords platform.

Google TV Ads allows advertisers to buy air time through an easy-to-use interface, selecting the desired networks, dayparts and programming to reach their target audience. Advertisers then set their budget with a pre-defined CPM cap (you can bid as low as $1.00 per 1000 impressions) and the service provides an estimated media buy amount based on traffic estimates derived from “second-by-second data from millions of anonymized set-top-boxes” and the expected number of impressions during the selected schedule.

Google TV Ads then provides daily reports with data on where and when the ad was shown; number of impressions, measured as active televisions tuned to the commercial for two seconds or more; average seconds per impression, including the average seconds by initial audience (number of seconds by audience members tuned in at the beginning of the ad) and the percentage of that initial audience retained from start to finish.

Don’t have a television ad? No problem! They’ll even help you produce a new commercial through the Ad Creation Marketplace (Google AdWords account required).

The real power of this will be unlocked by those who are best able to merge their offline advertising with digital media - all in one place - with the ability to measure results and revenue from traditional media at a much finer level of detail. On television, offer codes and specialty URLs that drive consumers to a website help make that integration possible, but there is opportunity for human error in the transfer, and that’s before accounting for the impressions that go wasted on guys like me who fall asleep with the TV on almost every night. If only the :CueCat hadn’t been so far ahead of its time…

So it’s been a really busy couple of weeks here in the West End, but that hasn’t dampened our enthusiasm for blogging. And we couldn’t be happier that one of our favorite clients still LUVs to blog.

Here’s wishing you more candy than you should be allowed to eat at once for Valentine’s Day.

Shortly after the holidays we walked in to the RD2 offices and saw that Santa Ronan had brought us a shiny new 42″ flat-panel HDTV. It’s got a gorgeous picture and has come in very handy for presentations in the office. As long as there’s a nice new TV there, what office couldn’t use a sweet gaming console to go along with it? Oh, right…

But wait! Thanks to a Carnegie Mellon Ph.D. candidate and his innovative solution to create a low-cost interactive whiteboard, there is now a business case for outfitting your office with a Nintendo Wii system. All you need is a “Wiimote”, an infrared LED light-pen (see the video on how to make one yourself) a Bluetooth connection and his software. And if you’re going to have a Wiimote or two laying around the office, you might as well go the full nine, right?

The anniversary of a momentous event from my childhood just passed unnoticed by me until a friend from high school emailed me a link to a story and slideshow from my hometown newspaper.

At the risk of dating myself, it was thirty years ago this week that the Blizzard of 1978 struck South Bend, Indiana. I’ve heard the storm described as a winter hurricane over land that dumped something like three feet of snow on us (and we already had a good two feet on the ground!) with winds that gusted up to 60 MPH creating mountainous snow drifts. As a nine-year-old kid, it was a great time to be alive: more than a week off from school and enough snow to create a really cool network of snow forts connected by tunnels - which caused my mother to worry about cave-ins.

A collection of random memories from the Blizzard of ‘78:

• After it had snowed like crazy for a more than a day and a half, my workaholic dad thinks he’s going to work in the morning. He walks out to the garage, hits the door opener, and as the door goes up, all we see is snow… all the way to the top. Turns out the gale-force winds pushed a drift from the bottom of our driveway up to and over our garage. Awesome. My dad hits the button to put the door back down and walks back in the house without saying a word. That one moment captures the Essence of Dad to me.
• Mom: Ever prepared. While there were panic-stricken folks all over the city who’d been caught off guard by the ferocity of the storm, my mom went out and stockpiled enough supplies to easily see the five of us through until we got plowed out. She knew what she was doing. As usual.
• Watching our neighbors walk back to their house after coming over for dinner. Took them like 25 minutes. To get next door.
• Gladly telling the city plow driver he could use our driveway to turn around. Seriously, that shaved off a good four hours’ worth of shoveling right there.
• The Blizzard Twins: One of my good friends from high school and my roommate at Indiana University during our freshman year had twin brothers born during the Blizzard. His mother had to be snowmobiled out of their neighborhood and taken to the hospital in one of those big plow trucks. Hard to believe those little kids are thirty years old now.

Having spent the last 11 years in Texas, I don’t often miss the winters back home. But I’ll never forget that one.