Last Lines: On Target With Advertising
Reprinted from: TV Technology
September 2008
The emergence of VoD and IPTV as viable commercial services in Europe offers the potential means of turning the vision of televised targeted advertising into a reality. This is because in offering VoD and IPTV service, broadcasters are necessarily formulating multiple one-to-one relationships with their target audience rather than the one-to-many relationships that have historically characterised the world of traditional television.
The provision of target advertising is a natural extension of this new kind of broadcast environment. Targeted advertising takes advantage of IPTV and VoD configurations to provide addressability; which allows advertisements to be tailored for, and delivered to, specific regions and demographic groups or even to individual television sets.
Broadcasters delivering targeted advertising over IPTV may even require some form of identification method to ensure that the person downloading the content is old enough to receive it legitimately. This will make it easier for them to identify the actual person that is requesting content downloads rather than merely the address from which that request originated. Potentially, it also provides scope for even more aggressive customisation of advertising material.
However, while the technology needed to deliver targeted advertising is now available, there are a range of issues and challenged that broadcasters need to tackle before services are rolled out across Europe.
Privacy
One of the primary concerns related to the need to preserve the privacy of the individual. It is important to emphasise that, in rolling out addressable advertising, this would need to be a key priority. Any addressable advertising implementation would need to be carried out taking existing and likely future privacy regulations into consideration.
BT’s highly contentious secret trials of the Phorm advertising system demonstrates just how controversial this issue may become. According to a recent article in PC Pro magazine, “BT tested Phorm’s targeted advertising technology with 18,000 of its customers in a secret trial conducted in 2006. A leaked BT document revealed how, ‘only 15-20 trialists identified the presence of the system and had a negative reaction’.”.
The Information Commissioner’s Office recently confirmed that it won’t be taking any formal action against BT for the secret trials. However, the controversy does demonstrate the need for operators and service providers to tread very carefully in this area.
To ensure that systems remain legal, broadcasters may effectively have to deliver personalized targeted advertising without being able to draw on specific personal details. To so this, they may need to take a general sample and look to elicit from that a projected morel of the target audience.
In carrying out the necessary data mining to support this approach broadcasters will have to deal with many of the same issues that retailer and fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) brand owners have been confronting for generations.
Logistics
There are also concerns around the logistics of pricing, billing and scheduling for multiple streams of advertisements. This is largely because by its very nature targeted advertising necessitates audience fragmentation with multiple different copy issued to multiple and distinct target groups. In this environment, how does the broadcaster manage and collate all the information created in a cost-effective manner? Administering the as-run logs alone may necessitate a prohibitive investment in terms of both time and money.
Broadcasters may have to look at building campaigns for sensible target market size to be able to bill for it effectively or alternatively find and effective way of ‘grouping’ that target market. After all, it will not be practical for the broadcasters to send invoices for thousands of separate micro-payments for each advertising spot.
Equally, the broadcaster will need to thoroughly research the sales plan for the new approach to be able to accurately gauge likely ad-sales values and to therefore gain the trust of the industry in these new types of advertising campaigns.
Ultimately, the emergence of target advertising calls for the broadcast industry to invent a new commercial model to define, facilitate and charge for these emerging targeted advertising techniques.
The nature of this model will depend to a large extent on what the regulators decide in terms of the level of targeting that is permissible, what type of service is being administered – whether it is IPTV, VoD, or some kind of conditional access system, for example – and finally the prevailing infrastructure within the broadcast environment.
In implementing whichever model is chosen, broadcasters will need to partner with technology service providers with the experience and expertise to be able to advise on a suitable methodology for target advertising and to implement the right solutions to support this.
These providers will need to answer important questions such as how to introduce the new methodology as a concept to advertisers and broadcasters, how to integrate it into a package that the broadcaster can sell to the advertising agency, and how to help both groups incorporate the new approaches into their working day.
MSA Focus.
