This week's announcement of Google's 'advertising, technology, and research partnership' with NBC Universal has got everyone talking again about just how important Google might become to TV advertising. And since I'm an advertising analyst who also recently spent a couple years covering digital TV, it's something I've been asked about a few times. My take: while there's room for Google to make TV ad buying more efficient and accountable, there's only so much you can do to target ads on TV -- and so Google can't, and won't, cause nearly the upheaval in TV advertising that they did in online advertising.

Google's dominance of online advertising is based primarily on their ability to target relevant advertising to consumers. But it'd be incredibly difficult for Google (or anyone else) to ever target TV ads nearly as well as online ads, for several reasons.