BOSTON – If the six biggest American cable companies have their way, Canoe Ventures, a joint partnership between Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cablevision, Charter, Cox and Brighthouse, will forever change the way television advertising is sold, seen and experienced.
In a nutshell, the new joint venture is moving towards making ads which air on its cable systems completely addressable and interactive, while feeding almost real-time viewership data to media buyers, said Canoe CEO David Verkin during the closing session at the 2008 CTAM Summit here in Boston on Tuesday.
Using Discovery program Mythbusters as an metaphor (Discovery CEO David Zaslav was on the same panel after all) Verkin said it’s time for the industry to bust up the myth that advertising on the Internet is more accountable and targetable than television advertising and embrace the Canoe model which will see TV ads become far more targeted and trackable than even web ads.
Under the Canoe concept, television will become addressable and interactive thanks to the data from the set top boxes owned and operated by its MSO parents. “Set top box data is a superior currency compared to 60,000 people meters,” said Verkin, referring to the existing TV ratings system, who then explained the MSOs collectively have 57 million set tops deployed right now. The company wants 10 million active addressable set tops showing targeted ads inside of two years.
While the people meters might be able to show TV ratings, only Canoe data will let advertisers direct their ads to the right homes – and then send that STB data back to tell buyers “how many dog owners saw the dog food ad,” said Verkin.
Canoe will also enable voting and polling with the cable remote (during American Idol, for example) and requests for information like asking for a coupon or a free sample. “This is an application advertisers are desperate for,” said Verkin. Canoe plans a large scale request for information program “by this time next year,” he said.
However, Canoe will not have any sales force of its own. Verkin says the company will work with and train the existing national sales forces deployed already by cable channels as it has no designs on taking over that function. However, Canoe’s first deployments will happen during the local avails and be sold by the MSOs’ sales forces. The local avails are those two minutes per hour American cable channels make available to carriers to sell.
Substantial obstacles remain, such as the myriad remote controls customers own when they will be attempting to interact with ads and other content, and decisions on how new revenue will be split, but programmers are very interested in making this work, too. “Advertisers will pay a higher CPM for this… it’s extra money,” said Zaslav.
“Then the question is, ‘how do you divide it up?’”
So to begin with, advertisers, over the next few months, will be able to place ads that hit particular cable areas, if not direct homes, which will come later. Cable will then send the data back to the advertisers while maintaining the individual privacy of their customers.
This all sounds great for advertisers and the MSOs and with the number of set tops involved and the national scope of the joint venture, it has a much better chance at working, even though past years are utterly littered with failed JVs and interactive and addressable ad ideas and TV-Commerce plans (remember Wink?).
Despite all that, Verkin is convinced “this will change the way America uses and watches TV.”
Um, Canada too, for that matter. If it works – and it sure looks like the willpower is there to make it work – one hopes the Canadian MSOs and specialty channels in attendance were listening, because it won’t be long before Canadian buyers want the same thing.
