AFI BLOG: Media and Technology

Variety

Advanced cable boxes to yield customizable ads

Called the holy grail by some TV advertising executives, the age of so-called addressable TV marketing — which would allow dog food ads to be sent only to dog owners — has arrived.
This new paradigm will feature advanced set-top boxes — courtesy of the cable industry’s hush-hush Project Canoe initiative — that will, the cable biz hopes, deliver on its long-touted promise of precisely targeting ads to individuals based on taste and lifestyle just like Internet advertising does.

Movie marketers could benefit from addressable advertising — especially boutique film divisions that seek niche auds.

“For a Fox Searchlight film, say — where the audience is going to be smaller and more sophisticated — it should be very easy to cherry-pick a small subset to market to,” says Tim Hanlon, exec VP of Denuo, the media futures division of media agency holding company Publicis Group.

For bigger tentpole movies, analysts say, film marketers could send out different creative executions, targeting different audiences through one media buy.

Pushing the envelope is Google, which, based largely on its extraordinary ability to tie Internet search to targeted text-based ads, generated an astounding $16.6 billion in revenue last year (putting this in perspective, that’s about a quarter of the overall online advertising market).

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