Advanced Advertising Archive

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Cable Ops Lag as Google, Others Mine Set-Top Data for Advertising

By
charlie
Posted in: Advanced Advertising, Operations, Metrics & Transactions Management

Michael Manzo, CMO, Openet

Michael Manzo, CMO, Openet

February 22, 2010 – If the ability to tap the digital set-top box as a data mining resource is a measure of where the balance of power will lie in the emerging advanced advertising arena, the holders of the keys to the kingdom may have some catching up to do.

Over the past year two giants of the Internet world, Google and Microsoft, have parleyed expanding access to set-top data into a key selling point for their TV advertising platforms. Microsoft, leveraging its acquisition of set-top data aggregator Navic, is facilitating NBC Universal’s advertising operations in the Los Angeles market in what officials say is the first of many such deals now in the offing. Google, in affiliations with Dish Network, TiVo, Nielsen and Visible World, is making use of data generated moment-by-moment across millions of set-tops both for metrics on which to base valuation of the ad avails it auctions through Google TV Ads and for new ad targeting initiatives.

But it remains to be seen how aggressively the cable companies will act to make use of new data-gathering platforms on offer from industry vendors that could strengthen their positions as direct ad sales players, both locally and at the national level. Theoretically, through the auspices of Canoe Ventures, cable operators could leverage highly detailed information gleaned from tens of millions of digital set-tops to provide a far better measure of viewing than currently exists and to establish targeting profiles for addressable advertising.

“The cable industry has been talking about audience measurement capabilities for a long time, but it hasn’t adopted an end-to-end solution or a migration strategy on how to get there,” says Michael Manzo, CMO of Openet, Ltd., a supplier of advanced event processing and transactional management systems for network service providers. “Now there’s a real threat from the likes of Google who have the potential to dismediate operators and programmers in this space.”

Google now claims it has the ability to compile detailed viewing records on all types of programming across four million Dish subscriber set-tops and 1.6 million TiVo set-tops, which not only represent a huge sampling base for rating program performance but also provide advertisers detail on what types of viewers are watching specific programs based on geographic and demographic profiles. To enhance ad targeting capabilities to a larger national viewing population the company is also tapping Nielsen’s Claritas Prizm data base, which aggregates Census and other data to define every U.S. household in terms of 66 demographically and behaviorally distinct segments.

“2009 has been a breakthrough year for our advertisers, inventory partners and the TV Ads platform,” says Mike Steib, director of Google TV Ads and emerging platforms, in a recent posting on the Google site. “We have worked with thousands of advertisers to target TV campaigns more effectively, and our network has grown to include 17 inventory partners. Google TV Ads exceeded 100 billion served impressions in 2009, as we continue to engineer solutions for better targeted and more relevant ads.”

The company is applying the analytics capabilities of its Web-based ad network to provide extremely detailed views of viewing performance, Steib notes. For example, Google, by tracking how many seconds viewers watch before changing a channel or hitting fast forward on their DVRs, is able to assure advertisers they won’t be charged if viewers watch less than five seconds. And Google has taken steps to incorporate tracking of viewing of its programming affiliates’ content on the Web as well as on TV channels.

To provide its advertisers the flexibility to leverage all its data for purposes of targeting ads, Google has licensed access to Visible World’s software, which allows advertisers to tweak their ads to fit specific user profiles and to switch out ads on the fly based on how ads are performing. Visible World recently enhanced its targeting capabilities by partnering with Acxiom, Experian and Nielsen to create a data exchange that pulls together all the available set-top data these companies aggregate through their various affiliations with service providers and other entities.

Of course, Google can only auction avails from the 17 cable networks it has cut deals with, which include a handful of majors such as CNBC, MSNBC Bravo, MTV, USA and many lesser niche channels. And Google has not cracked through to the broadcast networks.

Similarly, Microsoft, while it has access to data compiled by Navic from 35 million set-tops, has yet to announce program affiliations beyond its NBC Universal deal in Los Angeles. But, as these players seek to gain traction, the pressure is building on cable operators to come up with a set-top-based data base that will enable audience measurement and ad targeting on a massive scale, far beyond what these competitors can accomplish individually.

“Everybody realizes it’s a problem,” says a Time Warner Cable executive, asking not to be named. “It’s widely recognized that the ability to use this data on a national level would be game changing for the industry.”

But, he adds, the industry must come up with a set of best practices respecting the gathering and reporting on this data that operates on a continuum, which means there has to be a mediation process that everyone agrees on that can work with all the incompatible vendor-specific billing and set-top data collection systems in operation across thousands of cable systems. “The reality is Time Warner Cable and the other Canoe partners are working together to help the industry define a best set of practices, but it’s not easy,” the executive says.

While MSOs have access to the raw data on a scale unmatched by anyone else, they face big hurdles trying to put that data to practical use without help from new advanced software systems, says Alan Breznick, a senior analyst at Heavy Reading. “For one thing,” Breznick says, “set-top box and video server measurements tend to be operator-specific or even system-specific, leading to inconsistent data formats. So pooling set-top data from several systems that are run by the same cable operator can be a tremendously complicated task, and this grows more complex across systems managed by different operators.”

But, he adds, there are now solutions in the market that allow operators to systematize data gathering into a useful mode of measuring viewership click by click, second by second on all TVs in the home and to define audience profiles in ways that are highly useful to advertisers. “The set-top data is there to use, the key is to do it in a better way,” he says.

The advantages are obvious. Conventional ratings reports from Nielsen rely on reporting from just 18,000 “people meters” plus another 25,000 or so polling boxes placed in households nationwide. “Not only is the current sampling base too small to catch all the nuances of viewing on the local level; Nielsen doesn’t even measure many of the less viewed channels, which means it’s missing about a third of the prime time viewing audience,” Breznick says.

Nor, he adds, is there any sure way to determine whether people are actually watching when the TV is on or what the viewing patterns are on all the TVs in the house. Studies have found that diary errors and pushing wrong buttons on people meters may be distorting national ratings by up to eight percent, he says.

In contrast, the new software technologies collect real-time, second-by-second click streams from three basic sources – real-time viewing (linear broadcast and switched digital video), on-demand viewing (VOD and DVRs) and interactive engagements (interactive TV programming, tru2way applications and Embedded TV Binary Interchange Format, or EBIF, features). This means, for example, that an SDV manager can collect the linear broadcast and switched digital tuning data while an EBIF/application server gathers the critical set-top box data and a VOD server would collect all on-demand purchases.

A vital element to the new capabilities is the aggregation of all this real-time click stream data into data bases where it can be stored over long periods of time and accessed for use in whatever types of reports match operator requirements. For example, operators can send transactional data, such as VOD purchases, to their billing systems for processing, as well as collect and store ad placement data from the ad servers in the data warehouses for reporting and analytics, providing key visibility into the viewership of specific ads.

A big first step toward facilitating the national effort to build a measurement and reporting platform for use through Canoe would be action on the part of individual MSOs to implement these new data analysis systems in support of a holistic, highly detailed view of content consumption across their footprints. “We’re seeing a need for evolution not revolution,” says Openet’s Michael Manzo.

Openet offers the new type of audience measurement platform described by Breznick. The solution enables the correlation of real-time television viewing with demographic and psychographic profiling information to deliver a highly granular tabulation of data that operators can leverage many different ways. “This has been deployed and is a proven solution,” Manzo says, adding that the platform performs similar functions with regard to high-speed data and broadband mobile usage.

The key to moving forward, Manzo suggests, is to identify immediate benefits to existing spot sales operations that will justify putting a platform like Openet’s in place, rather than trying to rationalize implementation on the basis of long-range goals alone. “The first use of this data will be by operators for internal media sales use,” he says.

Indeed, as Breznick notes, there’s a real payoff for operators who can use a platform like Openet’s to measure viewing on channels not surveyed by Nielsen. “It’s an opportunity to turn avails on those networks into real paying spots,” he says.

Best estimates from recent analysis suggest adoption of set-top based techniques would allow cable operators to increase their own spot sales revenue by as much as seven percent each year, Breznick says. Operators can also use the new audience tracking software tools to recover revenue currently lost to unbilled subscriptions. Moreover, the new measurement system can provide a full accounting of viewing on time-shifted programming, in contrast to the three-day limit imposed by Nielsen’s new 3C system, which, in any event, has yet to be widely adopted.

Daunting as the challenge might be for legacy data collection and reporting systems, the comprehensive corporate-wide capabilities extending across all vendor products that Openet offers is right in stride with the “transactional intelligence” solutions its customers already have in operation worldwide, Manzo notes. “Right now 70 percent of all U.S. voice and data traffic is processed through Openet systems,” he says, citing AT&T, Sprint and Verizon Wireless as major customers in the billing reconciliation and revenue assurance space.

Globally, he adds, 84 entities serving 500 million customers are using Openet, resulting in the processing of over 20 billion events and transactions per day. “All of this requires really fast processing of data from complex networks, which we do at sub-100 millisecond latency rates,” he says.

Along with speed and scaling of software processing capabilities, the volume of data to be managed in the cable audience measurement arena requires massive storage capabilities. “You need to store pedabytes of data over 12 to 18 months,” Manzo notes. “You’re not gathering up FTP files every night. Your software has to manage a steady inbound volume that adds up to billions of daily events and records.”

This includes detail on ad campaigns collected from all the video elements – VOD servers, DVRs, ad servers and set-tops – as well as everything off the high-speed data and wireless platforms, once operators are ready to weave those outlets into a converged ad view. And all of this has to be enriched with reference data collected from billing and other sources.

Once all this information is aggregated it has to be analyzed and distributed in reports that are easily accessed by all stakeholders on user-friendly dashboards. “There’s a tremendous amount of slicing and dicing going on to run reports very fast against such massive amounts of data,” Manzo says.

Many issues have contributed to cable operators’ hesitation to put such capabilities to use, especially at the national level. One is their reluctance to share information. Another is the resistance of the programming community to accepting precise measurements that could result in damaging adjustments to their standings in the Nielsen-generated ratings competition. And, of course, the word “targeting” has become so sensitive owing to the privacy uproar that industry executives have stopped using it in public forums.

But with addressable advertising strategies that employ privacy-protecting anonymity techniques now on offer from the likes of Google, Microsoft and Visible World, it would appear the cable industry will have plenty of cover on the issue. The real risk is that targeting could gain mainstream momentum before cable operators get to the starting gate.

As for the battle over ratings systems, here again the demands of Madison Avenue in a weak TV advertising market are becoming too great to ignore. “It will be a long, long time before Nielsen is replaced holistically,” Manzo says, “but there’s every chance Nielsen may refine its model and work with Canoe rather than looking on Canoe as a competitor.”

Openet is only in a competitive position with Nielsen by virtue of Nielsen’s adherence to an outmoded model, he adds. “If Nielsen is willing to improve the quality of their data-gathering methods, we’re more than willing to talk with them.”

Ultimately the economics of the benefits attending the type of measurement capabilities Canoe can bring to the table will prevail, he asserts. Measuring that 30 percent of prime time viewership that watches channels not measured by Nielsen will generate new advertising revenues, he says – for example, $6 billion annually on a ten percent lift. And the ability to reach highly targeted audiences will bring in a vast population of advertisers who have been unable to make use of TV.

As for whether cable operators will finally cooperate on setting a national template for data aggregation, clearly, time is running out on the old modus operandi. Whoever ends up leveraging set-top data to the full potential demanded by the advertising community will be in the driver’s seat when it comes to negotiating the terms in the emerging advanced advertising arena.

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MSOs Aren’t Waiting for Canoe In Pursuit of New Ad Initiatives

By
charlie
Posted in: Advanced Advertising, Models & Strategies

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David Porter, VP, advertising product development, Cox Media

David Porter, VP, advertising product development, Cox Media


&Headline=MSOs Aren’t Waiting for Canoe In Pursuit of New Ad Initiatives
&Article=February 18, 2010 – Notwithstanding the fits and starts of the cable industry’s struggle to go national with an advanced advertising platform, individual MSOs are aggressively building out their own foundations in response to mounting demand from advertisers for better ROI on ad dollars.

New initiatives underway at Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cox Communications, Cablevision and many other cable companies are either in advanced stages of initial trials or already in commercial rollouts. Priorities and strategies vary widely, but all are exploiting the data-gathering capabilities of their set-top and back-office infrastructures to provide advertisers better ways to match ads to audiences and to measure audience engagement.

Time Warner Cable, for example, has quietly launched a data-gathering initiative that employs Openet, Ltd.’s cable-optimized Audience Measurement solution to provide advertisers a much more accurate accounting of how their ads are performing. At the same time, says a TWC executive, speaking on background, by leveraging second-by-second feedback from set-tops that can be turned into reports on what subscribers are watching across the full channel lineup, the new platform gives TWC’s local ad sales force a better idea of what their spot avails are really worth.

“If the data show a large share of the audience is tuning out ten seconds into a spot ad, we can report that to our advertisers,” the executive says. “And, with this platform, we can measure all the channels, not just the ones that Nielsen measures. That gives us the ability to put real value on all the niche channels that otherwise go unmeasured and therefore are undersold. And, at the local level, there’s far more value in the comprehensive information on local viewing of all channels that we can assemble compared to the limited amount of metering Nielsen does in any given market.”

While the Openet platform affords operators the ability to build addressable advertising around user profiles compiled anonymously from viewing behavior and demographic and geographic data, TWC has no plans to take this step, the executive says. TWC, like many other operators, does not want to incur potential publicity fallout from such applications.

“Privacy is a bigger issue with addressability than is the case when you use the data to produce rating metrics,” he notes. “As long as we’re collecting that information in an anonymous way the ‘icky’ factor doesn’t come into play.”

Meanwhile, at Cox the latest steps on the advanced advertising front have to do with introducing dynamic ad placement into time-shifted programming as part of the “MyPrimetime” initiative underway in many of the MSO’s markets. And the company has acted to streamline all types of ad placements generated by its sale teams with introduction of the cable industry’s first all-digital system for managing ad distribution.

The company says that more than 90 percent of the 43 million Cox Media spots produced annually are now managed digitally through its SpotXpress program, which allows clients to upload spots via a secure online portal, eliminating the delays associated with shipping physical content. The digital media management system also ensures that spots maintain optimal video quality and audio fidelity by avoiding the transfer to analog media.

Digital ad distribution obviously will facilitate implementation of dynamic ad placements in on-demand programming, including the company’s MyPrimetime service, which allows subscribers to access programming from network storage 24 hours after it has aired. In November the company announced it had launched a dynamic on-demand ad placement trial in Phoenix with NBC Universal to test the value of inserting different advertisements into the same programs so as to allow viewers to experience relevant ads regardless of when they watch.

The companies are working with an unnamed large advertiser in conjunction with ads placed in two programs: NBC’s The Office and USA Network’s Monk, both of which are available through MyPrimetime. During the trial, up to four ads and/or promos in both programs are refreshed several times per week, including ads at the beginning of the program as well as ads within the program, known as interior breaks.

“The addition of dynamic ad replacement and impression reporting gives Cox MyPrimetime the richest available feature set for supporting advertising in VOD,” says David Porter, vice president of advertising product development at Cox Media. This not only helps Cox Media built ad revenues; it creates a monetization incentive for programmers to allocate high-value content for time-shifted viewing.

“We’re talking about the most popular content on TV, and programmers are not going to be willing to put that on VOD for 30, 45 days unless there’s a way to monetize that,” Porter says. “The only way to do that is to replace the ads.”

But, of course, there’s much more to the benefits that come with dynamic ad placement. “We think about how often you can refresh it,” Porter says. “We think about being able to report usage discretely on those ads – so I can tell you how many people saw your program and I can also tell you how many people saw a specific ad within your program. If you put all that together, we have a very compelling platform for the programmer, for the advertisers and for the consumer.”

The same strategic vision underlies the initiative underway at Comcast, which last fall announced it had launched a VOD ad insertion program in Jacksonville, Fla. At the time Comcast said it was inserting standard 15- and 30-second promotional spots as well as newly introduced 20-second spots designed to drive tune-in for upcoming shows and specials on PBS KIDS Sprout and FEARnet, but it’s clear this is just the beginning of an initiative that is likely to spread company wide.

“The press release announcement is great,” says Nick Troiano, president of BlackArrow, which is supplying the campaign management and decision system for the Jacksonville project. “But what I think it really represents is Comcast – and other MSOs are doing the same – is now making a concerted effort and prioritization of dynamic VOD.”

Moving in stride with advanced advertising in the time-shifted space is all the work surrounding interactive ad engagement, telescoping and addressability in linear programming, where MSOs are leveraging EBIF (Enhanced Binary Interchange Format) or EBIF-like software to enable such applications across the digital set-top footprint. As previously reported (December, p. 1), the pace of advanced advertising rollouts on the EBIF platform is accelerating, but it’s still impeded by the need to overcome network and processing barriers to efficient use of the technology.

A big step toward improving the functionalities and implementation processes associated with EBIF was taken by CableLabs and Canoe Ventures in early February with their joint announcement of a new version of the standard. They said the new EBIF 106 includes support for “unbound” applications, which are apps like Caller ID, sports/news tickers and electronic guide extensions that are not bound to any specific program, and for addressability based on customer or device data stored in the set-top.

The new version will also provide support for the time-shifted environment with applications that can report whether viewers are watching live or time-shifted programming or that allow users to set recording times and reminders in their interactive guides. And, crucially to achieving much-needed administrative efficiencies, the platform now supports application permissions and resource management to ensure applications match with the terms of specific business arrangements.

“I think you’re going to look back on this period in time as an inflection point where advanced advertising becomes main stream in the cable industry,” says Cox’s Porter. “And I think EBIF is what’s going to get us there.”

In contrast to the highly individualized approaches to dynamic ad placement in VOD, where MSOs and suppliers have incrementally developed enhancements to legacy VOD platforms to enable things like short-form ads and disablement of fast forward, EBIF provides a standardized platform that will work across the entire industry, Porter notes. “From day one EBIF has been thoughtful about advertising and interactivity and really is designed and spec’d to facilitate advanced advertising,” he says.

But Porter acknowledges the pace of rollouts of applications this year will be piecemeal. “Look at any rollout of new technology, and it goes one market at a time,” he says. “You launch in one market and then as you launch in another market or system there’s rework that’s necessary. So I think the key here is patience. It will take some time before we have this ubiquitous across every cable home.”

Results from early implementations of advanced advertising in the linear programming domain are fueling operators’ commitment to the agenda. As previously reported (November, p. 13), Cablevision has moved ahead aggressively with an interactive ad platform that is not based on EBIF but with the stated intention of evolving to EBIF over time.

Cablevision recently released statistics signaling strong results for its Optimum Select campaign, which began in the fall. Measuring what it calls the conversion rate on various offers accessible through the select button on subscribers’ remotes, Cablevision reported the campaign began with a 40 percent conversion rate in conjunction with promotions offered by Gillette, Benjamin Moore, Century 21, Halls, Unilever and Colgate-Palmolive and recently hit 70 percent on ads from Colgate-Palmolive. Local ads from healthcare providers, travel agencies and other outlets are delivering similar results, the company said.

“You press select and basically via that commercial you can get a sample at home, you can get a coupon, you can get a brochure from an advertisers,” says Barry Frey, executive vice president of advanced platform sales at Cablevision. “It’s all opt in. That’s the beauty of this on-demand world where we’re addressing the consumer needs. We’re giving them the choice.”

Cablevision is also in the middle of an18-month experiment in targeted advertising with Visible World, which provides support for on-the-fly customization of advertising tied to data on income, gender and other parameters. Visible World, which has long supported rudimentary addressability based on geographic zones, intends to launch the highly targeted capabilities as a product later this year in conjunction with its work with Cablevision.

As all these individual MSO initiatives build momentum through engagement with the programming and advertising communities, participants continue to point to an eventual coming together to support national advertisers’ purchasing efficiencies through the services provided by Canoe Ventures. But it’s clear it will take awhile.

After the first Canoe initiative aimed at creating a national ad buying option tied to local zone profiles failed to get off the ground because operators could not agree on how to define and share sensitive market data, the venture turned to an initiative leveraging use of EBIF to support a request-for-information application that advertisers could purchase to run with national campaigns. The RFI offer was scheduled to launch last fall but was postponed to this spring.

Meanwhile, owing to the focus on EBIF-based opportunities, Canoe has not been aggressive about setting up a uniform mechanism for selling ads into the time-shifted programming domain. But it’s clear the big players in cable are counting on Canoe to be there as they continue to forge ahead with their individual initiatives.

“Today Canoe is very focused on deploying a lead-generation product that would allow consumers to request brochures and samples and things like that contained within a 30-second commercial,” Porter says. “That’s a very compelling product, and at Cox we have a similar product that we’ve deployed since 2003. It’s wonderful. And so it makes complete sense for Canoe to capitalize on what we’ve done in our local markets and bring it to a national scale.”

As for Canoe’s role in VOD advertising, Porter says, “They’re looking very closely at what Comcast, Cox, Time Warner and some of the other MSOs are doing in terms of developing the architecture, the business models and the work flow to make that happen. I think if you fast forward a year or two from now you’ll see the dynamic ad insertion at a very prominent spot at Canoe.”

The fact is, says BlackArrow’s Troiano, the industry has a ways to go before sales of time-shifted programming avails on a national basis will be feasible. “The cable environment is a heterogeneous environment,” he says. “That’s not going to change anytime soon.”

Even though, conceptually, dynamic ad insertion with addressability might be an easier sell than interactivity in terms of the sales processes and changes in ad buying modes that come with the latter, getting to a national purchasing platform in VOD is much harder, Troiano adds. “The standards, the technology infrastructures across MSOs have not matured enough to actually allow for that cross-platform, cross-operators sales process,” he says. “We’re working with all the right MSO operators to figure out how to standardize the processes and workflows and the technologies to support incremental buys.”

It’s a big task that starts with understanding who the customer is. “Even though we sell our products to both the Comcasts of the world, the distributors, and we sell them to the programmers, the NBCs, CBSs, etc., we really consider our customer the ad sales person, because the ad sales person has to be able to effectuate that buy,” Troiano says. “And they need to know two things. They need to know what’s my available inventory, and then, assuming they can deliver that ad, how do I get paid for it. If you can’t solve those first two questions for the ad sales person, you’re not going to see a big shift of ad dollars.

“It’s not just the campaign management, the buying and selling of the ad,” he continues, “It’s what are the processes on the programmer side to prepare that content or that ad, how do they actually send it and share with operators, how do they actually deliver the content so that they get paid on it and how does it get reported. So when we talk about unification, it’s within that entire supply chain – how do you actually create efficiencies and workflows and standardization across that so that you can facilitate an ad buy.”

But there’s more to it than standardizing procedures, he adds. The addressable advantages that come with placement of ads in on-demand programming that’s requested by a specific user bring with them the need to share information and to determine how granular the profiling data should be.”How the MSOs will share or not share information with the programming community” is the question.

The difficulties attending cooperation essential to achieving the national clearing house vision have fueled skepticism and impatience across the advertising community. Speaking at the recent Future of Television conference in New York, media industry investment advisor and analyst Jack Myers articulated the perceptions of many on this score.

“Cable operators have completely different systems,” Myers said. “They’re unwilling to come together in any kind of meaningful coalition or collaboration to develop a single platform for the advertisers. They can’t even do versioning on a geographic basis without coming up against tremendous internal cross-MSO politics.”

But money talks, and the realization from the early forays into dynamic time-shift placements and interactive linear advertising that the revenue projections floated by industry leaders aren’t pipe dreams may finally move cable operators to take the necessary steps. “I certainly understand the frustration from Madison Ave. about how long it’s taken,” Troiano says. “I think the reality is consumption of VOD is growing every year and every month. It’s growing pretty aggressively, pretty quickly. As long as consumers continue to embrace it, advertisers are going to want to reach those consumers.”

And there’s big money at stake. As Porter notes, the revenue surge cable is looking for isn’t about getting a bigger piece of the current TV advertising pie. “The overall marketing ad budgets are not going to grow,” he says. “They’ve been consistent throughout the years.”

Instead, it’s about direct marketing. “What we’re looking to do is find a more accountable way for marketers to spend their dollars with us and a more seamless and efficient way for the consumer to engage in that advertising,” he continues. “Direct marketing is a huge business and commands the lion’s share of advertising dollars. We are now bringing accountability and direct marketing to the television. So we expect a lot of those dollars will flow over to TV.”

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Comcast Media Center Expands Support for VOD Advertising

By
charlie
Posted in: Advanced Advertising, Technology Platforms

Sanjiv More, senior director, advanced advertising & VOD sales, SeaChange International

Sanjiv More, senior director, advanced advertising & VOD sales, SeaChange International

January 5, 2010 – Comcast Media Center has stepped up support for dynamic VOD advertising in a new trial with SeaChange International amid other new measures aimed at accommodating growing demand from programmers and advertisers for new ways to monetize on-demand content.

The SeaChange trial, which involves ad placements on VOD content supplied to Kansas-based Sunflower Broadband from the HealthiNation network, is another step in CMCs efforts to streamline use of various vendors’ VOD ad management solutions, says Jon Shaver, director of content development at CMC. “The trial is going well,” Shaver says, “and if it continues to do so we will support [the SeaChange AdPulse On Demand system] going forward.”

Distributing VOD content to cable systems by satellite and, as of December, fiber is a big part of CMC’s business. MSO affiliates receiving VOD content from CMC serve over 35 million subscribers, representing 90 percent of the market served by the top 25 MSOs, Shaver notes.

“We’ve been supporting dynamic ad insertion one or another going back to 2006,” he says. “That’s when we teamed up with Comcast Spotlight (the MSO’s ad sales division) and Tandberg [Television, now a part of Ericsson]. We’ve been supporting Tandberg’s AdPoint system since then.”

More recently, CMC has added support for BlackArrow’s Advanced Advertising System in conjunction with Comcast’s choice of BlackArrow to lead the MSO’s ad insertion technology for On Demand programming, starting with applications in the Jacksonville. Announced in October, that project is currently focused on inserting standard 15- and 30-second promotional spots as well as newly introduced 20-second spots designed to drive tune-in for upcoming shows and specials on PBS KIDS Sprout and FEARnet, says Diana Kerekes, vice president of video content for Comcast. “The ability to update VOD advertising will help us offer feature parity with traditional linear and Internet-based advertising systems,” she notes.

Right now “feature parity” with linear is the primary goal in these early rollouts of advertising tied to the CMC VOD distribution service. Traditionally, VOD advertising campaigns have had limited effectiveness due to the static nature of the ads being encoded directly into the content stream and the long lead times associated with ad scheduling.

“Initially VOD advertising was as far from dynamic as you can get,” Shaver says. “Our rallying cry around here is this is just unsupportable.”

Typically 90 days would elapse between the ad scheduling decision and actual availability of the content at the local level. To streamline the process at its end CMC developed its Express Lane platform, which allows programmers to access the work flow online, add their ad metadata tags and schedule a late placement prior to distribution on the fly. “We’re able to accept assets a few days before the start date and to deliver those assets in time to support propagation at the MSO,” Shaver says.

“Express Lane allows content providers to say, ‘I want this content to go to this particular market, whether it’s the feature asset or the ad asset,’” he explains. “You can schedule an ad for convertibles down South and skis up North. You can place several assets and build several play lists on tops and tails.”

“Tops and tails” refers to the metadata tags that dictate pre- and post-roll ad placements at the beginning or end of the program. “The next step is getting into mid-roll content – being able to place an ad within the content,” Shaver notes.

Right now the “lowest level of granularity” in terms of asset targeting is the individual cable system. CMC will be able to support distribution to more targeted zones once CableLabs develops the metadata specifications to support further subdivisions geographically. But when it comes to demographic targeting, that will continue to be done at the MSO level, he adds.

The three-month trial with SeaChange, Sunflower and HealthiNation CMC doesn’t represent any further advancement beyond the processes already in place with the Tandberg and BlackArrow VOD ad placement systems, Shaver says. “First we want to make sure it works within everyone’s [campaign management] system and is not negatively disruptive,” he notes. “Secondly, we want to see that it supports our advertising model and works as advertised. We want all parties to be satisfied.”

Sunflower and HealthiNation, a health video company that produces original education and lifestyle programs, agreed to participate in the field trial after several months of lab testing at the CMC. The cable company, which serves communities in northeast Kansas with triple-play service, has been using dynamic VOD advertising on its local content platform for three years.

“We have customers who say to us they’re not aware dynamic, targeted VOD advertising is real and happening,” says Sanjiv More, senior director for advanced advertising and VOD sales at SeaChange. “When Sunflower first launched with us in 2006 they only were doing VOD ad insertions on local content – community information types of programming. And then as the process matured they’ve added 25 or more national program providers to join in that market to do VOD advertising, including placement of local as well as national ads. This is real.”

The engagement with CMC is another step in the larger development process at Sunflower, which SeaChange still describes as a trial. “We all agreed we’d contribute our expertise and time and information with regular feedback because the business is still in its infancy,” More says. “We have roadmaps where we’re going to become more sophisticated.”

VOD ad placement management systems like AdPulse work with ad campaign management systems to execute on the business rules set by advertisers. “When those business rules are keyed in by the ad management system that runs VOD advertising, those ads are only run when the policy conditions are met,” More says. “It’s an extremely efficient way of reaching very difficult-to-reach consumers and to be able to quantify what’s happened with the schedule. This hasn’t happened before.”

A key to further progress will be the next phase of the specifications being developed through CableLabs for standardization through the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers. Presently SCTE 130 specifications provide a standardized means of setting up dynamic advertising placements so that multiple campaign management systems can interact with a placement management system like AdPulse.

The version of AdPulse running with Sunflower is one developed prior to issuance of the SCTE 130 standard. “Phase two will incorporate 130, interior ad breaks and more and more targeting,” More says.

From the CMC side one of the big steps forward in VOD advertising this past year was the center’s adoption of the Nielsen viewer measurement system for time-shifted programming, known as C3. CMC’s C3 VOD service, by providing a means of measuring the average commercial minutes in programs that were viewed in time-shifted mode during the three days following the programs’ linear broadcasts, serves as a complement to dynamic ad placement in other VOD content not tied to immediately time-shifted broadcast.

CMC acquires real-time broadcast programming and delivers it for VOD placement within hours of the original broadcast. The 3C technology allows Nielsen people meters that tune to linear programming to measure the viewing in the time-shifted versions. “It gives advertisers and programmers a more accurate recording of the viewing of their assets,” Shaver notes. “We’ve dealt with quite a number of content providers doing 3C, and we’ve heard rumblings of very good numbers associated with it.”

Indeed, he adds, the pace of programmer participation in time-shifted distribution has accelerated rapidly of late and will probably continue to do so as the opportunity to monetize that content firms up with wide-scale use of 3C. “NBC and CBS are providing more and more content, and ABC is as wel,l I believe,” says. “So you’ve got the big linear networks and traditional cable networks, which were the early adopters. Prime time content is definitely on the upswing.”

Overall the portfolio of advertising support tools creates a more comprehensive approach to monetization on VOD than previously existed, Shaver says. “It will take longer for MSOs to widely adopt dynamic VOD advertising,” he adds. “But the beautiful thing about 3C is it’s here now.”

0

Video Advertising Is Expected To Lead Web Resurgence in ’10

By
charlie
Posted in: Advanced Advertising, Models & Strategies

January 4, 2010 – Here’s a good start to the new year – a bellwether research firm is forecasting a rebound in online media spending in 2010, led by the emergence of video as a major force in Web advertising.

eMarketer predicts that online advertising will grow 5.5 percent this year to $23.6 billion, compared to a decrease of 4.6 percent in 2009 when Internet ad spending finished the year at $22.4 billion. While most online segments will experience modest growth, video advertising is set to spurt ahead by nearly 40 percent in 2010 to $1.4 billion, up from $1 billion in 2009.

Predicted growth in 2010 will make video one of the top three categories online, behind online banner ads and search. By 2014 video ads will generate more than $5 billion, search ads will corral about $16 billion in ad spend, and banner ads will produce about $6 billion, eMarketer says.

Video is the only category that can be expected to continue growing by big amounts in the years ahead, the firm says. “Video ad spending growth will far outpace any other online format, running in the 34 percent to 45 percent range from 2009 through 2014,” says David Hallerman, an eMarketer senior analyst. “These extremely high growth rates are the result of video ads moving from the sidelines to center stage, becoming the main form of brand advertising in the digital space.”

In contrast, spending on rich media is slated to rise 5.5 percent this year ($1.6 billion by year-end) and banner ads by 3.3 percent ($5 billion by year-end). Other online ad formats contributing to the total include email, lead generation, classified and sponsorship.

Marketers are warming up to video advertising because it’s more effective and it’s also familiar to them. They can also easily shift budgets and creative onto the Web.

According to comScore, brands using online video or rich media ads have seen lifts in incremental buying of anywhere from 20 percent to 40 percent or higher compared to other ad forms. ComScore tracks the impact of online video ads by measuring, for instance, whether Internet users who saw an online video ad then went on to visit a site or buy a product.

But in the near term, don’t expect major advances in video formats online. Pre-rolls will continue to dominate on the Web, because most advertisers prefer cutting down existing TV commercials into 15- and 30-second spots for online pre-rolls. According to online video ad network YuMe, about 95 percent of the ads YuMe, and most other video networks serve, run in the pre-roll format.

But there is a growing body of evidence that advertisers can generate a higher return on investment when they create Web-tailored ads, often using a pre-roll as the springboard.

Both YuMe and competitive online video ad network ScanScout have found that engagements rates with video ads are three to four times higher when a marketer uses custom spots, new creative and interactivity than they are for pre-roll ads.

YuMe recorded more than three billion views of video ads in the first nine months of 2009 and found that when advertisers customize the creative for the online video medium they can garner much higher click-through or engagement rates. “We see up to five percent click yields when people really take the time to develop creative that is online-specific and have the opportunity to engage the audience versus taking a TV ad and sticking it in front of the content,” said Michael Mathieu, CEO of YuMe.

Traditional types of pre-rolls clock in at about one percent interaction, YuMe found. Some of the clients YuMe has served up tailored ads for include Axe, Dove, Vitamin Water, Universal Pictures and Land Rover.

Because of the success with tailored ads, YuMe is exploring additional types of online video ad formats such as embedding ad units in the video. That could include contextually relevant ads layered on top of the video itself.

Competitive video ad network ScanScout has also found that customized spots yield much higher engagement rates. Interactive ads that let customers participate in polls, for instance, are generating four times better click-through rates than standard pre-rolls, said ScanScout, citing data from a recent Vaseline campaign run across its network.

The Vaseline campaign included a pre-roll unit that allowed users to vote on their favorite features of the lotion. Interactivity can also include letting viewers opt in to receive coupons or more information on a product.

As advertisers shift more dollars to the Web and as more studies pointing to the effectiveness of interactivity and customization emerge, marketers are apt to experiment with those video formats more frequently. Still to be determined is whether the Web audience is ready to accept a shift from pre-roll placements to ad breaks in the content.

0

Cable Takes Action to Clear Last Hurdles to Scaling EBIF

By
charlie
Posted in: Advanced Advertising, Models & Strategies

Tony Werner, CTO & EVP, Comcast Cable

Tony Werner, CTO & EVP, Comcast Cable

November 25, 2009 – The cable industry hopes to expedite the push into advanced advertising and interactive TV by streamlining execution in crucial areas related to reliable data transmission and uniform means of matching applications to specific business terms.

While MSOs have made great strides in seeding their headends and digital set-tops with the software components that will maximize the reach of new modes of advertising and interactivity, the pace of implementation will depend on how quickly these remaining issues can be resolved.

“We’ll do many things next year, but it takes awhile to get to larger scale,” says Nomi Bergman, president of Bright House Networks.

Indeed, the scaling issue has become critical now that a growing number of programmers, advertisers and applications developers are buying into the opportunities associated with the industry’s embedding of the EBIF (Enhanced Binary Interchange Format) client software in millions of legacy digital set-tops. “I think we will get scale,” says Comcast CTO Tony Werner, noting his company will have “somewhere north of ten million households with EBIF agents” by year’s end.

But he acknowledges there are “still a lot of pieces and things to work through.” For example, there’s work to be done on integration of specifications and “getting user agents acting in common across multiple MSOs.” As another case in point, Comcast has been rolling out new apps and advertising models on a local basis but now the company must get to where it can implement work flows seamlessly across its national footprint, he says.

Werner and just about everyone else in the industry is confident these hurdles will be cleared. “We’ll get there, and I think it’s going to be huge,” he says.

That confidence is buttressed by initiatives MSOs are taking individually and collectively through the auspices of CableLabs. “The technology has been specified; the set-tops are out there,” says Paul Liao, president and CEO of CableLabs. “But now the hard work of getting the networks ready is about to be underway.”

Liao makes clear he wants CableLabs to be “much more involved in some of the practicalities of these deployments.” That entails reaching agreement on best practices and “really understanding how to get the network up and going so we truly have a national platform,” he says. “Basically, this is a massive data system. Every router has to have all the back addresses, switches set correctly, and all that has to be done. And once that’s done this thing will go like greased lightning.”

From a pure engineering standpoint the “pipe cleaning” now underway is the last remaining hurdle to scaling EBIF. “EBIF applications are bound into the programming streams from the programmers to the cable headends,” notes Don Dulchinos, senior vice president for advanced platforms and services at CableLabs. “Those signals have to traverse groomers, transcoders and other processors, and you need to be able to verify they went through. You need a clean path.”

On the business side another big piece of unfinished business is the establishment of a uniform process for making sure a particular ad or application is tied to a specific business deal. “This has to be automated,” Dulchinos says. “We have to set rules and make sure they are caught and read and that execution is verified back to the programmers.”

CableLabs has a working group focused on this piece, he says. “We’re writing it up and documenting performance to ensure that applications match business arrangements with MSOs wherever those apps are running,” he adds.

In mid November CableLabs hosted the industry’s largest and most comprehensive Advanced Advertising Interop to date involving 24 suppliers along with the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers, Canoe Ventures LLC and observers from cable, programming and other entities. The week-long event served to underscore that the industry’s efforts to standardize formats and interfaces under the Advanced Advertising 1.0 Specification jointly developed by CableLabs and Canoe Ventures will provide advertisers the scale they’re looking for.
“The great turnout shows the increasing momentum behind the MSO and Canoe efforts to adopt standards that allow for the delivery of new ad forms to a national footprint,” Dulchinos says. End-to-end interoperability was demonstrated for a variety of ad formats including interactivity (such as voting and polling and request for information applications), ad insertion in VOD content, ad insertion in linear content, telescoping and graphic overlays on VOD content. Some of the formats were enhanced with addressable advertising, which taps into the platform’s ability to aggregate customer response information through a common measurement format without exposing personally identifiable information.
While Liao says it appears CableLabs will not have to develop a new version of EBIF thanks to the ability of technicians to work out inconsistencies in user agents that have cropped up in interoperability tests, there likely will be a need for new specifications that complement the existing platform. These won’t be essential for getting the current wave of EBIF-based ads and apps off the ground, but they’ll be needed “if we really want to make use of the fact we have addressable advertising and things of that nature so that we can extend SaFI (Stewardship and Fulfillment Interfaces) applications [to] take maximum advantage of this platform,” Liao says.

Doubts as to the ultimate value of cable’s advanced advertising platform to programmers, advertisers and MSOs from a pure monetization and consumer value perspective are rapidly fading as ever more strategies are tested in the field. “We’re moving through a phase of bold programmer experiments with interactivity,” says Peter Low, president and CEO of ITV software supplier Ensequence. “The results are better than anticipated.”

For example, interactive ads are engaging three to eight percent of viewers who see such adds for anywhere from three to six minutes, Low says. “On the content side,” he adds, “when there’s an interactive enhancement 15 to 20 percent of people will use it, and we’re seeing numbers soar in some instances to 50 percent.” Ratings for a show with interactivity versus the same show without such apps are jumping by five to 20 percent, he adds.

Low stresses these are early days when results, as good as they have been, are likely impeded by the fact that interactivity has yet to become a routine part of the viewing experience. “When interactivity becomes a core piece of the way networks make TV and creative departments are thinking about it all the time, the numbers will go up dramatically, because these people know the interests of viewers,” he says.

A%26E Television Networks has been working with Ensequence in some of these trials. Mark Garner, senior vice president for distribution, marketing and business development at A%26E, confirms Low’s assessment of the appeal of interactivity, adding that the network is finding that when interactive apps are involved people are staying “tuned in for longer periods of time.” As for interactive advertising, “We’re seeing a lot of engagement – ten times greater engagement than you see on our broadband outlets with contextual click-throughs,” he says.

Werner, too, reports that early results with the apps Comcast has introduced on the EBIF platform are very encouraging. These generally fall into three categories – advertising, extensions to electronic programming guides and unbound apps, where the apps, such as local weather or traffic reports, run as text overlays on request from viewers, irrespective of what programming they’re watching.

In the advertising category, Werner cites one referred to as “Ready, Remind, Record” as having strong appeal for both advertisers, in this case programmers, and viewers. The programmer promotes an upcoming show with a message to the viewer telling when the show will appear and asking whether the viewer would like a reminder to appear before it airs and whether they would like to have it recorded on their DVR. “It’s clever,” Werner says. “It’s one that consumers will like and one that the people with the programmers will very much like.”

“We’ve also got an RFI (request for information) app set to run with advertisers,” he adds. “[Comcast ad sales unit] Spotlight is selling that, and it seems to be working pretty well.”

An example of a guide extension is a “More Like This” app, where a banner appears when a viewer clicks on a particular channel asking whether the viewer would like to know about other programs that are like the one just chosen. “This app has been developed but it’s not out yet,” he notes.

One that has rolled out with what Werner describes as “remarkable” results is an on-screen click to buy app running with the Home Shopping Network. He also notes Comcast is now offering caller ID on the TV screen in systems running on Motorola set-tops.

But for all the effort behind EBIF, Werner makes clear the long-range strategy remains tied to the more advanced tru2way platform, a Java-based middleware that runs on set-tops that have the processing power to support much more graphically and functionally rich applications than can be done with EBIF. “We want to put all our [guide development] horse power behind tru2way, which we’re doing,” Werner says. “Next year most of our new boxes will be tru2way, and they will get our ultimate guide with a much more modern look and feel.”

0

Cable Op Puts Web-to-VOD Tech To Use for Ads and New Content

By
charlie
Posted in: Advanced Advertising, Models & Strategies

Streamlining VOD management

Streamlining VOD management

October 1, 2009 – Cable operator Bresnan Communications has linked up with Web-to-VOD technology firm Clearleap in a deal that lets Bresnan serve up VOD ads and create localized linear channels on the fly.

Bresnan is implementing Clearleap’s Web-based tools to manage its local VOD content and ads. As an example, Bresnan uses Clearleap to manage “The Spot,” a portion of its VOD section dedicated to local content on jobs, dining, events and real estate. Bresnan ranks as the nation’s 13th largest operator with about 300,000 subscribers in Colorado, Montana, Wyoming and Utah.

The operator has been offering that type of local content on VOD, but the Clearleap pair-up helps Bresnan deliver the material to VOD menus much faster. That’s because Clearleap’s product suite is Web-based. Once an operator hooks a Clearleap device into a cable system, the operator can then manage, sort and upload video from the Web to a VOD lineup instantly, explains Braxton Jarratt, Clearleap’s CEO.

“The process to get the content into a VOD system is still quite manual in most cases and can take days,” Jarratt says. “This automates the process so you use the online tools to make it happen within minutes.”

That includes long-form ads.

“The main purpose for utilizing Clearleap in the advertising division is for encoding and distribution of local and regional long form advertising to our VOD servers,” says Julie Harbour, director of interactive advertising at Bresnan.

For instance, Bresnan is running ads for local homes for sale on VOD using Clearleap tools, Jarratt says. Since much of the local real estate videos being created today around the country live on the Web, having a system that ports content from the Web to VOD opens up new sales opportunities, he says. Plus, home buyers don’t just research new homes online; they look on VOD too. “You can check your neighborhood and the price range, and those are played back as VOD ads,” Jarratt says.

In addition to the ad possibilities, Harbour says Bresnan plans to fire up additional Clearleap tools.

“In addition to the VOD advertising transport, there is opportunity for supplementing our VOD menus with niche online programming, which can be sponsored by local advertisers with pre- and post-rolls,” she says. “This would open up new revenue opportunities to finally monetize free programming on VOD without any heavy lifting from additional vendors. Clearleap makes this sponsorship revenue opportunity seamless.”

Bresnan will also use the Clearleap tools to ingest, manage and program local linear channels that will feature a mix of local and regional programming. Bresnan will be one of the first service providers to use such Web tools to manage linear programming, Jarratt says, adding the operator has deployed Clearleap across its footprint.

Clearleap customers also include Atlantic Broadband and four additional undisclosed service providers. The company expects to add two to three new customers in the coming weeks

Clearleap works by replacing most of the functions previously served by tapes, hard drive, FTP drops or transfers or manually pulling files. The Clearleap system includes a device that hooks into a cable system and operates like a VOD catcher , called Edge Exchange, while the rest of the system lives online. Edge Exchange establishes a direct connection to Clearleap’s Web system. Once configured, that lets the operator automatically push content out to the VOD menu.

“This is a better way to encode and ingest into the VOD system,” Jarratt says.

Clearleap has also inked deals with Web content providers such as Next New Networks and Revision3, which allows Clearleap’s operator partners to pick and choose Web content to deliver in their VOD offerings.

“This opens the opportunity for new kinds of content and you can replace and refresh VOD content,” Jarrett notes. “It lets you make VOD fresher or more regional, and it’s taking the Web work flow and speed and translating to VOD.”

0

Visible World-Google Deal Comes As Addressable Advertising Picks Up

By
charlie
Posted in: Advanced Advertising, Technology Platforms

Three permutations of targeted TV ads from Lenovo

Three permutations of targeted TV ads from Lenovo

August 6, 2009 – Targeted advertising technology firm Visible World has greatly expanded its already wide reach via a deal inked with Google TV Ads, the search giant’s television buying marketplace.

Under the new agreement, Google TV Ads will incorporate Visible World’s tools into its offering, so advertisers can customize their messages when they place their ad buys using Google’s auction model.

Visible World’s advanced advertising tools let advertisers tailor their commercials to different markets and demographics by dynamically swapping parts of messages on the fly, depending on where the ads are delivered. Google TV Ads operates as a self-serve, real-time auction system allowing advertisers to buy specific programs, day parts, networks and demographics at the prices marketers pick.

“This is all about media targeting and message targeting together, which is always the goal but so rarely done,” says Tara Walpert Levy, president of Visible World.

With the new partnership, marketers will be able to automatically create multiple variations on spots to mix up the offer, products, Web sites and even search terms for the ads based on elements like target audience and the performance of the ad, Google says. Google TV Ads measures ad effectiveness using data from set-top boxes.

Visible World and Google share natural synergies, with Google’s tools allowing for targeted media buying and Visible World’s for targeted creative. The kind of targeting the Visible World-Google TV Ads pair-up affords is becoming increasingly necessary in a cluttered media environment where advertisers need to eliminate wasteful messages.

That’s why they’re gravitating toward both Web-based solutions that allow for targeting and to the small but growing cadre of TV options in this vein. A deal like this can help lure more ad dollars to TV as marketers hunt out techniques to improve their ad performance.

Google TV Ads clients include Priceline, Lenovo, Buy.com and Jenny Craig. The deal came together because of Lenovo, a shared client.

Google and Visible World had worked together previously on some one-off campaigns for Lenovo, Walpert Levy explains.

“Lenovo had asked us to handle some campaigns where they were looking to use Google’s automated buying and selling and our automated customization,” she says. The computer maker compared the programs, audience and media plan from Google TV Ads and paired that data with the message tailoring tools from Visible World, she says.

The deal is also a response to the economy. Business has been up this year at Visible World as advertisers look for more efficient ways to spend their marketing dollars, Walpert Levy says. “With all the focus on the economy and doing things better and different, demand has actually been going through the roof,” she says.

On average clients are using Visible World’s tools to create nearly 20 permutations of an ad, a three times increase from three years ago, she says. Lenovo, in working with Google and Visible World, ran at least 50 different variations of its ads.

“They had all of the different pieces of their ads in our system, the product, the call to action,” she notes. “Sometimes they swapped the creative, the offer, sometimes just the URL. The whole point is to take away the fear of ‘how do I make 50 ads’ and make it easy with the system doing it automatically. More messages drives performance.”

Walpert Levy says clients are seeing 30 percent improvements in results compared to direct marketing campaigns. Other Visible World clients include Wendy’s and Sears.

Through deals with the largest cable operators, Visible World’s footprint reaches about 80 percent of local cable homes. The company’s technology is also used on national networks like MTV, Comedy Central, TVGuide, A%26E and History and local broadcast stations via a partnership with DGFast Channel.

Targeted ads are usually delivered to specific demographics or by time of day or network. Addressable advertising adds another layer by sending relevant ads to specific households based on demographic data. Addressable rollouts so far include Cablevision’s 500,000-home addressable ad effort that launched earlier this year in partnership with Visible World, a handful of market rollouts from Comcast and Echostar’s Google TV Ads launch.

Early data from addressable trials is encouraging. In its Huntsville, Ala. market, Comcast says customers are 38 percent less likely to tune away when an addressable ad is delivered. In general, targeted ads on TV generate a seven percent click-through rate, meaning consumers click on the ads using the remote seven percent of the time, which is much higher than the typical one percent or less response rate with direct response ads, according to figures from database company Acxiom.

Cablevision has used this technology to pitch phone, cable and Internet service to its own customers. The phone spot was directed to homes that didn’t have phone service from Cablevision and so on. The result was a double digit lift in sales results, Cablevision has said.

Google TV Ads is rising in usage. The unit reported earlier this year that it has begun booking upfront deals with major agencies and advertisers for the first time. Agencies like Deutsch have committed upwards of seven figures to spend in the system in the year ahead.

0

Next on Verizon’s FiOS TV Agenda: Web-to-TV, Advanced Advertising

By
charlie
Posted in: Advanced Advertising, Models & Strategies

Verizon's search-based Interactive Media Guide

Verizon's search-based Interactive Media Guide

June 18, 2009 – Verizon is preparing to take its TV juggernaut to the next level with introduction of wide-scale addressable advertising on linear and on-demand programming and rollout of Web-to-TV services.

The foundations for both initiatives are in place, with the pace of addressable advertising now depending on business deals and the introduction of Web-to-TV imminent following a series of beta tests with various unnamed portals, according to Joseph Ambeault, director of product development and management for video services at Verizon. “We’re talking about changing TV for good,” Ambeault declares. “Our vision is everything on demand.”

Verizon’s FiOS TV is now available to 9.7 million households, 2.2 million of which are subscribing to the service, representing a penetration rate of 22.6 percent compared to 18.7 percent a year ago. The carrier is offering in the neighborhood of 15,000 titles, including movies, pay TV content and network programming, in VOD mode.

Along with a growing body of TV programming rotating in and out of the VOD queue to support time-shifted viewing, on-demand options will soon include Web content, Ambeault says.
“We’ve wrapped up our betas and are in our go-to-market mode,” he says, in reference to a trial begun last July that brought Internet video to the TV.

The carrier will be leveraging its Interactive Media Guide platform to allow customers “to navigate select sites using browse or search tools, viewing that lower resolution video on the screen,” Ambeault says, declining to name which sites are involved. The guide was designed on the carrier’s in-house developed IP middleware platform to provide advanced search and other capabilities across all content sources.

“The navigation was set up to support not only video feeds in all their different flavors but also music and pictures and information feeds,” Ambeault says. “And so adding in any of the content that is accessible to the TV is actually fairly trivial to get it into the search index. The benefit of the IP platform is for all intents and purposes we can distribute all content to our set-top, and search, being robust as it is, allows us to be able to add whatever we start distributing into that index for the customers.”

Ambeault says Web content portals’ response to TV deals has ranged from enthusiastic to reluctant in a negotiating atmosphere that’s reminiscent of traditional program deal making.
“You get the folks who are very bullish, just as in the earliest days of VOD, you had folks like Scripps who were extremely bullish on free on demand and then you had people like Disney who waited a little longer to come to the party,” he explains. “As much as the Internet world attempts to say they’re different from traditional media, the more it seems to me like they’re basically the same, except they use a different distribution mechanism.”

Where advanced advertisking is concerned, the basic technology platform is in place to support addressable placements across linear and on-demand content. Ambeault says. Now it’s a matter of drawing participation, which may not be as hard as it would seem for a player with about 2.2 million TV households to offer as an audience base to advertisers.

“Most of our focus has really been at the platform level as opposed to the service level on getting things enabled,” he says. “So the first element was just getting ad insertion up and going, which happened shortly after we launched.

“The next element of that,” he continues, “is around driving better addressability – going from a geographic to a psycho-demographic [approach] – and so bringing in those particular capabilities which the IP nature of our platform makes much more realistic than some of the other platforms.”

Rather than going with one type of advertising management system, Ambeault’s team has focused on developing an addressable platform that can support different systems to ensure the best system is used for specific requirements. “Our strategy has been rather than to double down on any particular approach to play the field and watch for which particular approach, if any, shakes out as the leading approach,” he says. “We’re about to plug in our second one. So I’ll know if everything we’ve done leading up to now is going to work out as promised before this year is out.”

Verizon has deployed the cable interactive middleware platform known as EBIF (Enhanced TV Binary Interchange Format) to enable advanced ad placements on its linear programming, which is delivered in a shared access mode analogous to the way cable linear programming is delivered, as opposed to the switched, dedicated channel approach used in IPTV. On the on-demand side, content is IP-based.

“From our architecture standpoint linear and VOD are served by the same system, at least from a fulfillment standpoint,” Ambeault says. “So we think about it more as the ads unit. It would be interstitials; it would be interactivity; it would be banners wherever they happen to show up. It’s less important which service they’re in and more what the actual unit is and what you can do with it. A 30-second spot is a 30-second spot, whether I put it in a linear channel or a VOD channel. The advertiser still wants it targeted and to make it interactive.”

Early experiments have been encouraging, Ambeault adds. “We started out with interactive Olympics last summer, and in the fall we launched targeted banners in the guide,” he says.

“In general we’ve done some pretty neat things,” he continues. “Last year we had a multi-screen campaign that was strongly based in long-form VOD for Burger King. It was their Freak Out campaign. It was awesome viral video of customers showing up to Burger King and being told the Whopper was discontinued, and then what they did. It got an amazing response. And then recently Unilever actually did an interactive long-form VOD campaign for their Axe brand – cologne, hygiene products targeted at young men – and that was also very well received.”

Ambeault notes that while Verizon is engaged with cable’s Canoe Venture to ensure the basic operational interfaces and metrics that Canoe is standardizing on are included in the carrier’s advertising models, Verizon is not timing its rollout of advanced advertising to the staged implementations underway at Canoe. “We’re not going to wait,” he says, [but] we’re going to attempt as we go forward to make sure we’re not running off into the weeds from the rest of the industry.”

While Verizon has far fewer TV subscribers than the largest MSOs, the fact that its entire customer base is enabled for advanced advertising gives it strength to drive new models, Ambeault says. “On certain occasions we actually are more relevant because my platform is nationwide and it’s not little pockets of capabilities,” he says. “When I turn it on I bring all of them. While a major MSO brings dozens of millions or maybe two dozens of millions of customers to the table, the difference is, for advanced capabilities, they’re talking small numbers.”

Moreover, Verizon’s ad sales operation cuts across all outlets and opportunities. “The thing you have to remember is, when we sell advertisers we don’t sell two million, we sell 80 million,” he notes. “I have a lot of touch points with a lot of consumers across all of my lines of business. We don’t just sell TV. We sell the entire Verizon experience. If you look at our broadband, our wireless and our TV customers combined, our ad sales organization works across all those screens. I don’t have an ad sales organization working on one screen and a separate one working on another screen like a lot of the MSOs do.”

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