Interactive Ads: Gauging Potential and Reality

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Interactive Ads: Gauging Potential and Reality

Panelists at N.Y. Conference Like Current Progress, Want to See More

Somewhere between "now" and "five years from now," television programmers, distributors and advertisers will know whether interactive and targeted advertising will reach its potential.

For now, experts at an industry conference made clear, there's incentive on all sides to realize that potential and enthusiasm over what's happening right now at cable operators, including Cablevision Systems and Comcast.

There's also a realization that failure to use technology to increase the effectiveness of TV advertising runs the risk of putting cable into the same troubled boat as local broadcast-TV stations.

"Dollars follow eyeballs," said Time Warner Cable Media Sales New York regional vice president Steve Jacobs during a panel session at the Feb. 22 event in New York, put on by Multichannel News and Broadcasting & Cable magazines. "If we are content to sit with what we have, then we fall to the broadcast model."

Interactive advertising has left the development stage at Cablevision, said executive vice president of cable platform sales Barry Frey, and the New York-centric MSO is rolling out products. They include dedicated branded channels, showcases and more specific offerings such as "Select RFI," where customers press a button on their remotes to receive product information and catalogs via the mail, and "Select to Save," which allows viewers to save the long-form ad content to watch later.

Cable efforts, building on the Enhanced TV Binary Interchange Format foundation for interactive advertising across operator platforms, are getting noticed on Madison Avenue. After Comcast Spotlight and other partners, including Starcom MediaVest, recently reported very positive ad-engagement results from an EBIF trial in Baltimore, GroupM emerging media director Michael Bologna said he received 150 phone calls from clients wondering what the results meant in the context of different interactive-ad developments.

In a keynote Q&A, Bologna called the Baltimore trial a "successful addressable experiment" but said more tests are necessary to drive home how addressable technology can work for advertisers who have been slow to get involved in the space. GroupM also has its own trials in place.

Bologna said reports of one-off efforts from the likes of Cablevision or Comcast confuse clients because different providers are trying different products.

"The one thing that I would say to the industry that would help our clients is if the sales organizations of all the different players could consolidate a little bit," he said.

Bologna said the union of Comcast and the networks of NBC Universal could advance the cause by bringing together two parts of the triangle - big programmer and big distributor - omitting only the technology provider.

Canoe Platforms, the cable-backed consortium to roll out interactive advertising on a national scale, also is on the right track, but Bologna predicted: "It'll take Canoe five years to deploy a solution that's currently in the market now, like what Cablevision is talking about or what Comcast is talking about."

SeaChange International chief strategy officer Yvette Kanouff, on another panel, said that Canoe gets a bad rap for what it hasn't done, but not enough credit for what it has accomplished.

"What it has done is taken all the operators and tried to create a level of consistency, which is a huge task," Kanouff said. "They have made incredible strides ... There is a lot of potential for what Canoe brings."

Rentrak Advanced Media Information division president Cathy Hetzel said Canoe's potential for building a big base of interactivity is "fantastic," but "I think it won't stop anyone from moving forward" on individual rollouts.