Gottesman: Cashing In on ITV
By Tom Steinert-Threlkeld and Todd Spangler -- Multichannel News, 9/23/2007 6:00:00 PM MT
Want to order an iPod through your TV? Patricia Gottesman, Cablevision's executive vice president of digital marketing and commerce, is leading the team that will make that kind of transaction possible. She recently discussed the operator's vision for interactive commerce and advertising with Multichannel News editor in chief Tom Steinert-Threlkeld and technology editor Todd Spangler. An edited transcript follows.
MCN: Since you became the guru of digital marketing and commerce in March, with the formation of the interactive sales group, what have you been doing?
PG: From a marketing and development point of view … the first area is commerce. Specifically, we are creating a mechanism that will allow us to activate television advertising for direct ordering and home shipments through a credit card.
MCN: What kind of products are you talking about?
PG: Entertainment and consumer electronics frankly are the best to start, because there's already an understanding of what the product is and a desire for what the product is going to bring into the home, and instant gratification in these categories seems to be meaningful.
This is where we plan to begin, but we also believe there are a couple of unrelated areas that might be fruitful for us. … As an example, if I'm watching a commercial for Dove soap, and toward the end it launches into a separate marketing plug for a new product from Dove — skin lotion — I can press the remote and in a minimum number of clicks, maybe two, and I can get a sample of the new Dove skin lotion sent to my home.
MCN: How do you make your money in these various models?
PG: Right now, we are bundling our linear advertising and our interactive advertising into packages, and establishing a value for the transactions that we believe we're going to drive. … We have not yet established the financial model for the future in terms of how we will partner fully with an execution that sells like the 600,000 [subscription video-on-demand] orders that we placed last year [through digital television].
MCN: What are you going to call the general-purpose retail service? “Optimum Store”?
PG: We have been in the process of conducting an agency review to bring a partner in who will work with us and help us market, brand and advertise this capability to make it very attractive to our customers. So within the next couple of months, we'll be making an announcement on that score.
A second aspect of digital product development right now that we're very excited about is network ad storage. Another term for network ad storage is bookmarking. What we are developing is the ability to place a small visual icon onto a spot [on the TV screen] and educating our customers to know that when they see this icon, they can use their remotes to mark the spot, simply by clicking on it. They will then have that spot stored for them in the same way that we store active rental VODs.
And in addition, because they have signaled to us and to our advertising partner that they are interested in this product, we can enlarge our advertising inventory and place more material into that active rental folder about the product and related products to make advertising even more relevant than it is today.
MCN: When will these capabilities actually be live?
PG: We're planning on having advertising activated for commerce and also bookmarking in 2008.
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