Targeted Ads Still on Trial

Comcast Touts Addressable Results But Focuses on Interactive

By Todd Spangler -- Multichannel News, 2/22/2010 9:26:00 AM

Comcast reported encouraging results from a six-month test in Baltimore that delivered different ads to 60,000 households — a concept that promises to make TV spots more relevant than they are today.

But while the cable operator will continue to test the technology, in 2010 it plans to focus on expanding its reach with interactive TV ads, which is a strategy shared by the industry at large.

In Baltimore the MSO delivered different ads within the same commercial break across six cable networks to different household groupings; the groupings were based on nonpersonally identifiable demographics and aligned with advertiser segments. The addressable ads, from advertisers that included Walmart and Walgreens, accounted for less than 2% of the total inventory during the trial, which wrapped up last fall.

The results: Viewers who saw addressable ads tuned away 32% less of the time than homes that received non-addressable advertising. In addition, according to Comcast, the trial demonstrated a 65% greater efficiency from sending ads only to relevant groupings that an advertiser wanted to reach, based on the per-spot costs of addressable and non-addressable ads. It didn’t disclose pricing from the trial.

Comcast Spotlight, the cable operator’s ad-sales arm, worked with Starcom MediaVest Group in the trial. The metrics are similar to those the companies found when they paired up for a smaller, 8,000-home technical trial in Huntsville, Ala., from 2006 to 2008.

“What’s satisfying is that the results are pretty consistent with what we’d seen in Alabama,” said Bob Ivins, vice president of data products and research for Comcast Spotlight. “We wanted to see if we could get to scale.”

Addressable ads, however, have “some significant speed bumps,” Ivins noted.

For example, he said, being able to scale the hardware and software up from 60,000 homes to all of Comcast’s 24 million cable subscribers is “still a long stretch.” There’s also the question of whether the premium associated with an addressable ad is high enough to make the approach pay off , he said.

In 2010, Comcast will focus instead on interactive ads and rapidly deploying support for CableLabs’ Enhanced TV Binary Interchange Format, Ivins said. The MSO earlier this month said it has enabled EBIF in 12 million homes in 30 markets. The EBIF spec forms the technical foundation for the interactive advertising service to be rolled out by mid-2010 by Canoe Ventures, the joint venture of the six biggest U.S. cable operators.

In the Baltimore addressable advertising trial, as with the Alabama one, Comcast Spotlight used Invidi Technologies’ Advatar addressable technology. It also worked with Experian Market ing Services and media- measurement firm Kantar Media (formerly TNS Media Research).

But Cablevision Systems, for one, is plowing ahead on addressable ads, using an ad-targeting system from Visible World. The MSO says it’s on track to reach its entire footprint of approximately 2.9 million digital cable subs by June 2010.

Cablevision said it is delivering addressable ads for “a handful of leading companies,” but the MSO has not identified those advertisers.