Digital advertising getting "Zoned"..................................
TV's Digital Future: Fine-tuning Ads
By WAYNE FRIEDMAN
c. The Hollywood Reporter
LOS ANGELES -- Imagine a home where the parents are watching ''Touched by an Angel'' in the living room and their kids are watching the same show in another room. But when the show goes to commercial break, the parents see an ad for Oldsmobile, while the kids see an ad for Kraft macaroni & cheese.
Soon, six to eight major advertisers will sign multimillion-dollar local cable deals with giant cable operator Tele-Communications Inc. TCI will use digital technology to send different ads to individual cable homes, targeting different demographics, a TCI spokeswoman confirmed Thursday. These deals will follow an initial long-term agreement announced Thursday between TCI and consumer products bellwether Kraft Foods.
Kraft's deal will begin this year in major markets where TCI has systems, including Chicago, Dallas, San Francisco, Houston and Miami. A number of Kraft spots will appear in local advertising positions on many major cable networks, including CNN, ESPN, TNT and Nickelodeon.
The new advertisers will include companies from the automobile, fast-food, brewery, retail and financial industries. The TCI spokeswoman said each will have category exclusivity with their deals.
Digital technology enables advertisers to micro-target cable homes according to demographics and/or geographic categories. Cable executives call this ''zoning,'' where advertising spots can be targeted to reach zip codes, even particular neighborhood streets. With digital technology, commercials for products are stored on computer file servers and then distributed to selective homes or areas.
While advertisers have used digital technology in the past, Kraft is the first major marketer to make a multimarket local cable advertising deal. A TCI spokeswoman says by the end of 1998, digital advertiser technology will cover 90% of TCI's 11 million cable homes. Other cable companies also sell to advertisers using digital technology, but TCI has been at the forefront in attempting to push all of its systems to go digital.
Alec Gerster, executive vp of media services at Grey Advertising, which helped put together the deal for its client Kraft, said the deal allows Kraft to get in on the ground floor on digital advertising insertion technology. Kraft previously used similar technology when it bought time on Adlink, a local Los Angeles-area cable advertising interconnect service, said Jim Porcarelli, director of Agency-Of-Record operations at Grey. |
