BigBand, Partners See Big Market for Personalized TV Ads

BigBand Networks Inc. has announced new capabilities for its Broadband Multimedia-Service Router (BMR), which it claims give service providers the ability to deliver television commercials to individual recipients – a capability that could raise privacy issues.

The vendor, whose BMR is used by several cable operators, said it conducted demonstrations of so-called “addressable advertising,” which it defines as the delivery of highly-relevant advertising content to very small, specific segments of a television viewing population -- in tests with solution partners OpenTV Corp. and INVIDI Technologies Corp., at Cable Television Laboratories Inc. (CableLabs) headquarters last week.

CableLabs is a nonprofit research and development consortium dedicated to helping its cable operator members integrate new cable telecommunications technologies into their business objectives.

Traditionally, service providers have been limited to delivering commercials to mass audiences in large geographic zones of viewers -- southern California or western Chicago, as examples -- based on assumed demographics for the specified regions, the BigBand said.

BigBand said it and its partners give operators the ability to address ads to individual viewers based on relevant, but anonymous data such as viewing preferences, hobbies, interests, personal demographics, zip code, ethnicity and other parameters.

“It is definitely a step in the right direction in terms of being able to more accurately target the right audience for advertising, but it is still so early in the game to understand how advertisers will use it,” said Teresa Mastrangelo, principal analyst at Broadbandtrends.com “Additionally, I could see consumers having issues with privacy in the sense that they don’t want that type of information shared with advertising companies.”

BigBand said addressable advertising can also increase the likelihood that viewers will pay attention to commercials by dramatically increasing the relevance of each ad for each viewer. The growing use of personal video recorders (PVRs), the company noted, has given viewers the ability to skip ads that are not interesting to them. Addressable advertising can help mitigate the potential impact of PVRs on ad viewership, since viewers are less likely to skip relevant content.

“BigBand aims to apply the one-to-one marketing capabilities of the Internet advertising model to support the creation of a unique set of advertising products and services for digital TV,” said Ran Oz, chief technology officer of BigBand, in prepared comments. Service providers, advertisers and subscribers all benefit when ad content is more relevant, he maintains.

BigBand says the new addressable advertising capabilities in its BMR include the ability to select and supply advertising assets based on viewing habits associated with individual set-top boxes and enhance addressable advertisements and identify corresponding set-top boxes to which ads should be sent.

Additional improvements, the vendor added, support the ability to integrate with different ad campaign management systems to align ad deployments with overall campaign objectives and the power to allow advertisers to target television commercials more accurately and easily than was previously possible.

BigBand Networks Inc. www.bigbandnet.com  

Cable Television Laboratories Inc. www.cablelabs.com  

Open TV Corp. www.opentv.com

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