SAN ANTONIO – Can broadcasters pay heed to what a cable guy has to say about advertising?
Why not, given the cable guy, Paul Woidke, v-p technology for Comcast Spotlight, Comcast Cable’s cable ad sales group, which earned US$1.2 billion in ad revenue in 2004, selling local ad avail time to clients who buy time on the likes of CNN, A&E, ESPN and The Golf Channel, among others.
He oversees the technology running the ad insertion portion of the business and has intimate, first-hand knowledge of how the American advertising business is changing. When there’s new digital ad technology coming out, companies come to him very quickly, given Comcast is the largest North American MSO, with 21 million-plus customers/viewers.
First of all, he said Wednesday during the chief technology officer session at the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers annual gathering, the ad messages themselves must change. “The advertising portion of the cable business is going to have to completely redefine itself over the next three to five years,” he said.
“Consumers are in search of control and quantity and the paradigm of three networks and you go home and pick the least objectionable program to watch, went away a long time ago.”
“Advertising has to completely change how it operates or it won’t be viewed,” said Woidke. And, if it isn’t viewed, broadcasters lose that advertising paradigm which says people are going to pay big bucks to make programming. The business model falls apart.
The shift has to come in advertising messages that go from “being interruption in people’s viewing to become information while they’re viewing – that’s the key change and that’s what’s going to be built on top of the digital plant.”
That digital plant will deliver digital simulcast or switched digital or even personal unicast channels. And, when that happens, advertisers can then personalize or target ads so that while people in apartment buildings see an ad for a stackable washer-dryer, people in the burbs see an ad for lawn mowers, for example.
“We’re going to be creating new advertising technologies in which the messages are very, very specifically addressed to small segments – perhaps as small as a household,” continued Woidke. “and now at the end of the day, I can send six advertising messages simultaneously and no matter what you hear, it’s going to consume six times the bandwidth of sending one, but we need to find the ways to do that because that’s the end game: for us in the industry to be able to talk to the advertisers and the agency community about something they’ll never get from a terrestrial broadcaster, that they’ll never get from a satellite broadcaster, they’re only going to get it from cable.”
In Canada, of course, cable companies are prohibited by regulation from selling ad time in the U.S. local avails, holding the time for Canadian specialties or their own video services. But the addressable, digital technology should provoke interest in anyone who buys or sells ad time.
Lastly, Woidke said, worry less about digital/personal video recorders. “There has been a whole lot of ‘the sky is falling’ and doom and gloom over DVRs in terms of what it is going to do. There’s a lot of fear out there,” he says. “As a matter of fact, there’s probably a whole lot more fear than there should be simply because there are not as nearly as many deployed as some would make you think.
“There are more HD TV sets out there than there are DVR units,” Woidke continued. “I’m more concerned about being able to get my ad out there into an HD football game right now than about somebody fast-forwarding through it.
“DVRs are going to give us the opportunity to present advertisers with products and capabilities that they’ve never had before. In the past, if you missed the ad, you missed it. If there’s something you wanted to know in the ad, or wanted more information, there was no way to get that.
“The DVR device is going to provide in a really valuable way to let people get that information.”
– Greg O’Brien
