Ads That Know Who You Are, What You Want? Old News on the Web. Coming One Day to TV.
by Peter Kafka
Posted on March 4, 2009 at 6:13 AM PT
What if you could deliver ads, electronically, to people based on where they lived, what they liked and what they might be interested in buying?
Novel idea–for Web advertisers in the pre-Google (GOOG) world of the mid-1990s. But in TV land, where things move much, much more slowly, this is still a radical notion.
Hence, a long piece in today’s New York Times detailing Cablevision’s (CVC) rollout of a new targeted ad system that will reach 500,000 homes in the New York area. Worth a read, but if you’re in a rush, here’s what you need to know:
- The cable operators, who make very little money from advertising, have been trying to get some version of this up and running for many years.
- It shouldn’t be that difficult: The cable guys have a direct line to your house; they know, or should be able to know, what you like to watch and when you watch it; and they have all sorts of data about your finances and buying habits, via your billing information.
- But it has been difficult. And for some of the reasons listed above, there’s going to be a hullabaloo about privacy as this stuff rolls out on a larger scale–one day.
- Money quote is at the end from Visible World CEO Seth Haberman, whose company is providing Cablevision with the targeting technology: “Television was always big and dumb. Now, hopefully, we can be big and slightly smarter.”
[Image credit: cloudzilla]
Comments
This is Bob Ivins, VP of Data Products for Comcast Spotlight. I’d like to clarify what we are – and are not – doing in our Baltimore addressable advertising trial.
We want our customers to be in control, give them more relevant advertising, and protect their privacy. In our Baltimore trial, we gave our customers advance notice so they could opt out if they wished. We are using widely available and commonly used geographic and demographic data to separate households into relatively homogeneous, anonymous groups, or segments, that we believe might find a specific commercial more relevant than a generic ad. For example, an advertiser might provide an ad on minivans to households that are more likely to have families, or an ad for a two-door sports car to households that are more likely to have single people in them. This is very similar to how direct mail works.
I want to be clear that we’re not using any click stream data from the cable boxes in customers’ homes and we are not tracking what programs users are watching, or using any other viewing data to determine what ads are delivered. While vendors in this space may be developing technologies with capabilities like collecting clickstream data, that doesn’t mean we’ve chosen to use them – and in fact, we’re not using them. It’s important to us that our customers have a clear picture, because our customers’ privacy is very important to us.
Posted by Bob Ivins at March 5th, 2009 at 8:09 am