What's to Come

They're Still Not Ready

With all the hype and all the promise of addressable advertising, it's still not happening. An article I read in MediaPost called Address(ability) Unknown by Jonathan Blum, May 2006 issue does a good job in discussing this space. The article states

for all the money invested and all the interest generated, the number of by-the-home addressable commercials delivered in 2005 was exactly zero. And 2006 looks to duplicate this grim score.

I guess I knew this, but with all of the media hype by companies creating applications, it's easy to forget we're still at early stages of this development. The hold up, I think comes from the carriers inability to deliver individual ads to individual homes through their cable networks. But, why is this an issue? Don't they regularly send data to individual set-top-boxes today? Isn't an ad just data? The answer to both of these is yes. One of the stumbling blocks is volume. Today, a local ad is inserted into the programming at the headend of the cable system and distributed to all of the viewers on that system. To insert based on targeted households, this process needs to change where the insertions are made at a lower level . This could be within the cable system or could possibly be pushed down to the STB and called in by cue tones. These processes and applications are not in place yet to accomplish addressability of ads. Also, the issues of priority of ad placement, privacy and accounting are barriers to this becoming real.

Yet, this is a goal worth pursuing where the mechanisms are in place to send the right ad to the right person at the right time. If the cable companies don't get their part figured out, they'll forfeit ad revenue to those media that can deliver better results and accountability.

-Andy

posted by Andy Huckaba @ 8:54 AM