First Clicks for Canoe Ads

EBIF Takes National Stage With Interactive Spots

By Todd Spangler -- Multichannel News, 5/24/2010 12:01:00 AM

After years of promise, cable looks ready to put interactive TV into revenue-generating action on a national scale, across multiple operators.

Canoe Ventures has lined up four initial partners — Comcast Networks, Discovery Communications, NBC Universal and Rainbow Media Holdings — for the debut of the operator-backed firm’s interactive TV ads sometime in the next six weeks. Those programmers represent the first official go-to-market partners for Canoe, formed in 2008 by the six biggest U.S. cable operators.

The venture’s first interactive-TV application is a request-for-information overlay for 30-second commercials that will let viewers request coupons, product samples or information through the mail. The template-driven RFI application will be delivered using CableLabs’ Enhanced TV Binary Interchange Format.

Marketers across all categories are eager to try out the RFI capability, said Dave Cassaro, Comcast Networks president of ad sales. “Virtually every advertiser is interested in proving the value of television,” he said.

But Canoe is keeping quiet on one of the biggest questions: How many households will be able to view the ITV ads?

Exactly how many set-tops are not only EBIF-enabled, but ready to receive the Canoe RFI templates — and send back data about their interactions — remains a moving target, said Mark Mitchell, Canoe’s chief relationship officer. “It’s hard to nail down exact figures right now,” he said.

Cable operators are aiming to enable about 25 million households to access EBIF applications by the end of 2010. To date, Comcast has been the most aggressive in deploying EBIF, standing at about 12.8 million homes across its Motorola footprint.

However, Canoe will “always be behind” the MSOs’ deployment of EBIF, Mitchell noted, because the venture must ensure there’s a clear data path to each headend. Each Canoe-enabled cable network must also have enough bandwidth allocated to its feed to deliver the EBIF applications.

As far as the technical infrastructure, Cassaro said he is “99.999% sure that everything we have set up will work.”

Comcast Networks has signed up advertisers that have created RFI spots, Cassaro said, although he declined to identify them. The company will introduce the interactive ads with Style first, followed by E! and G4.

The interaction metrics are what Cassaro is most interested in seeing out of the initial RFI campaigns. “It’s not going to be millions or hundreds of thousands out of the gate, but the data will be projectable,” he said.

Meanwhile, Discovery will debut the RFI spots on Discovery Channel, while NBCU and Rainbow weren’t ready to discuss which networks will be in the first go-round.

The RFI service is Canoe’s first commercial launch. The company ran a trial of a zone-addressable service with Rainbow’s AMC last year. But Canoe pulled the plug on that initial “Community Addressable Messaging” product for various business and technical reasons prior to launching it commercially.

Canoe has instituted several privacy measures with the request-for-information service. First, each RFI spot requires a double opt-in, so that a viewer must click twice to respond to a coupon or sample offer. In addition, a third-party data processor will work with a programmer or advertiser’s fulfillment partner to send address information for viewers that have acted on an RFI spot.

“We never see [a subscriber’s data], and the advertiser and programmer never see it,” Mitchell said.

Under Canoe’s service-bureau model, programmers sell or make available interactive or addressable advertising enhancements on top of existing inventory — however they wish — and Canoe takes a cut of the transaction. In addition, Canoe provides reporting services back to programmer partners about the performance of campaigns as well as sales support, application testing, and sales and order-management integration.

As a sales tool for interactive advertising, a Canoe-led consortium of cable organizations and companies is promoting “SelecTV” as the brand covering EBIF interactive features.

Coming later from Canoe will be EBIF-based polling and trivia apps; t-commerce, to let viewers purchase products or services; and dynamic video-on-demand advertising insertion.

“We view this as a marathon, and we’re in mile one,” Cassaro said.

New York-based Canoe is owned by Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cox Communications, Charter Communications, Cablevision Systems and Bright House Networks.

ROWING OUT
Canoe plans to debut ITV ads in Q2:
Programming partners: Comcast Networks, Discovery Communications, NBC Universal, Rainbow Media
Initial launch: Late May or June
Delivery format: Template based on CableLabs EBIF spec
No. of households: Undisclosed
SOURCES: Canoe Ventures, Multichannel News research