January 22, 2008

Advanced Advertising at ET

Transformation in the Offing

By Jennifer Rinaldi

Organizers of last week's SCTE Conference on Emerging Technologies (ET) hit the right emerging note by including an executive from Google on a panel devoted to advanced advertising.

Presenting at the first session of the Los Angeles event, Google's Head of TV Technology and former CTO of OpenTV Vincent Dureau was upbeat about the potential for ad sales automation, which he contended was compatible with MSOs' legacy infrastructure and existing interfaces.

That could be the first step toward moving beyond a status quo that is looking increasingly unsustainable. "Traditional advertising is under siege," said John Morrow, VP of strategy and business development for Scientific Atlanta, a Cisco Company.

Morrow's statement highlighted the consensus among vendors and operators alike: To compete, cable must learn to think beyond linear advertising. Interactivity and "hyper-targeted" advertising, something consumers have come to expect in "online" experience, are the buzzwords and necessities of cable's critical hour.

The three formal papers on this topic presented at ET, excerpted below, threw a spotlight on both the difficulties facing the industry as well as novel solutions for the mounting task of increasing advertising revenue through nontraditional means.

Some excerpts

From "Irreconcilable Differences or a Match Made in Heaven? The Future of Advanced TV Advertising" by Morrow:

"The technologies and business processes needed to couple the advantages of Internet advertising with the compelling medium of television, and build on this advanced advertising model, are imminent. Standards such as DVS 629, which aims to replicate or in some cases surpass Internet advertising functionality, are now in the final stages of development and promise to deliver the benefits of addressability, measurement and reporting, and ease of campaign management. In addition to bringing these advantages to linear advertising, new forms of television advertising are increasing viable. VOD advertising, telescoping, DVR pause advertisements, interactivity, and other types of new advertising technology are entering the discussion."

From "Advanced Advertising - Technical Foundations" by Guy Cherry, chief architect of video systems for ARRIS (C-COR). Five requirements:

"… Delivery systems must support large dynamic content libraries and these libraries must be able to identify the avail structure for each content piece.
… It must be possible for the Campaign Manager to make session-based decisions and to update its advertising strategies and ad choices dynamically.
… Advanced advertising systems must support and leverage a high degree of interactivity.
… Advertising systems must track and assign value to inventory dynamically.
… Advanced advertising should support and leverage a multi-screen environment."
 
From "Stepping Beyond the 30-Second Spot Ad with Digital Overlays" by Adam S. Tom, co-founder and EVP of business development for RGB Networks:

"Digital overlay insertion in the compressed digital domain provides cable operators a cost-effective, scalable way to add targeted, relevant, and interactive advertising to the video services they are providing (from linear to switched digital video to video on demand to time-shifting) and allows them to tap into the escalating market opportunity of advanced advertising to significantly grow their revenue."

- Jenn Rinaldi