OT Carolyn, I think you've heard of this wonderful small cap. Should be a good week.
From Electronic Media, Oct. 11, 1999
Addressable ads just the start for individualized TV
By STEVEN J. STARK
Gary Shandling, as his TV alter ego Larry Sanders, used to viewers "no flipping," a cute way of saying they
should not touch their remote controls.
ACTV, a pioneer in individualized TV, hopes for just the opposite.
The company is looking to cash in on the race for directing TV commercials to specific demographic targets, thus saving advertisers millions of dollars.
ACTV, which was founded in 1989 and went public in 1991, is hardly alone in this zeal for addressable commercials, with companies such as Next Century Media, Wink Communications, Source Media and Worldgate also involved in the effort.
But ACTV says it is more than just addressable commercials. It wants to put the TV viewing experience on another dimension, letting viewers interact with those with other programming on TV and the Internet.
"There's no Pepsi to our Coke on TV," said Art Cohen, ACTV?s senior vice president of advertising and electronic commerce. "At conferences and ad agencies, nobody's challenged me in that there's someone else out there." Mr. Cohen, who came to ACTV from Your Choice TV, where he was in charge of advertising, said ACTV used to be "too hip for the room, because we had technologies and a system patented exclusively, but didn't have the marketplace because there were no digital cable boxes or Internet to the scope there is today." Here's how the technology works: ACTV encodes multiple advertisements in a way that allows for the ACTV
software in the set-top box to seamiessly select the appropriate ad based on a demographic profile. For example, Procter & Gamble Co. gives ACTV a series of product ads, and ACTV determines the appropriate audience for each ad using demographic targeting software, which has been used by direct marketers for years and modified for television. The encoded commercials are filtered by the set-top box software. So, all the ads go out, and the software does the rest. The TV viewer never knows this is happening. in cases where a subscriber is new, has not been profiled or does not fit into a particular demographic, an ad for a product that everyone uses- such as toothpaste-will be seen. Another aspect of the system allows viewers-to pick the commercials they want to see. For example, a Toyota commercial will show several models and then ask viewers which of the models they want to learn more about. By pressing a button on the remote control, the viewer can determine which commercial wfli be shown. By pressing nothing, the viewer gets the default ad.
Pick and choose
Programming, too, can become interactive with the same technology.
For example, on Fox Sports Southwest, ACTV hopes to turn avid sports fans into would-be producers and directory by giving them the opportunity to use their remotes for on-demand replays, camera angles, close-ups, statistic and trivia. Frank Deo, ACTV?s vice president of digital technology, said ACTV will bring three cameras and its own
production team to a baseball game to supplement Fox's eight cameras and its production team. The Fox and ACTV crews can watch each other's monitors and use each other's content, but one side does not direct another to use a shot, Mr. Deo said. Will people who use a remote to switch channels really be willing to work at watching a game, rather than kicking back and relaxing?
"It gives the viewer reason not to flip to another station," Mr. Deo said. ACTV President David Reese said the Southwestern United States was chosen to Beta test the technology because of ACTV's relationship with AT&T Cable Services of Dallas, which has a deep penetration of digital set top boxes?113,000 of 450,000 subscribers have them.
Ultimately, ACTV wants to put its technology on Fox Sports nationwide once more set-top boxes are in use, Mr. Reese said.
"It's an opportunity to tailor the viewing experience in such a manner that it maximizes your enjoyment by making available the features most important to you," Mr. Reese said.
Watch and Surf
Finally, picking up on a trend that is especially hot among young TV viewers, ACTV?s HyperTV enables content producers and advertisers to deliver Internet content that?s synchronized to a TV program. So someone watching MTV can simultaneously get from their computer musician biographies, song lyrics, concert schedules and tickets, e-commerce and tie-ins to retailers. "That's what these kids do [today]," Mr. Reese said. "They absorb media different than I do."
ACTV announced a deal in September with Showtime Networks to provide it with such programming on its Sci-Friday lineup |
