Don’t be surprised if your TV soon seems to know everything about your politics
By Brian Fung
By now, you're probably aware that much of your online behavior is tracked, logged and probably sold to third parties so that marketers can better target you with ads. Targeted advertising has become a fixture of the Web, in part because Internet browsing generates a wealth of useful data that's easily studied.
Television is a bit of a different story. Take traditional, over-the-air broadcast. For advertisers, it's the media equivalent of a sawed-off shotgun: not terribly accurate, but extremely effective when it does find the mark. Now, however, targeted advertising on television has taken a big leap forward. And it could represent the next evolution in data-empowered politics.
Dish Network and DirecTV on Monday announced a plan to jointly give political advertisers the ability to microtarget their ads down to the household level. That means that any of over 20 million homes in the United States will soon start getting highly personalized campaign spots that were meant just for them.
Here's how it works: While your set-top box is idle, it'll tune into a channel that's playing the ad you're meant to see. It'll record the ad using DVR, then insert it into your regular programming while you're watching a show — replacing or bumping the ad that was supposed to air instead. This can be replicated for any household that subscribes to Dish or DirecTV, so a political strategist can pick you out and feed you a unique message.
Some TV targeting is possible already. Individually, Dish and DirecTV have offered "addressable advertising" on their own networks for about two years. But, says Carol Davidsen, a former media targeting director for President Obama's 2012 campaign, it's never been available at this scale. That's why political operatives find this exciting: It gives them access to a far larger pool of potential test subjects for their material. That's right: Satellite TV subscribers are about to be subjected to the same rigorous testing that informed the Obama campaign's use of catchy e-mail headers.
Read the rest here, ... washingtonpost.com |
