Cogeco Cable is preparing to test the “next generation of TV advertising” through a newly announced partnership with Invidi Technologies and the Hamilton, Ont. TV channel CHCH.
Cogeco will begin a trial of so-called “addressable advertising” with CHCH sometime in the first half of 2011, said Ron Perrotta, the company’s vice-president of marketing and strategic planning in Montreal.
Using Invidi’s Advatar system, Cogeco will be able to deliver “tailored messaging” to individual households within the CHCH footprint. So while, for example, residents of an upscale neighbourhood might see a commercial for a luxury vehicle during a particular commercial break, residents of a working-class neighbourhood watching the same program could see an ad for the latest minivan or compact car.
The system uses public domain demographic information to accurately pinpoint “consumer needs and interests,” said Cogeco in a release. The result, it added, is more relevant TV commercials for audiences.
Markham, Ont.-based Capital Networks Limited will oversee the ad insertion operations.
The trial will encompass Cogeco’s cable systems in Ontario’s Golden Horseshoe–an area that includes Niagara Falls, St. Catharines, Hamilton, Burlington Stoney Creek and Oakville–and is expected to last for six months.
Perrotta said addressable advertising is “a very creative way” of addressing Canadian broadcasters’ revenue concerns.
According to Invidi, the Advatar system monetizes every viewer in the cable system and allows for premium pricing of the most popular avails.
“It’s more efficient for the advertiser and clearly much more relevant for the viewer,” said Perrotta. “It’s akin to direct marketing via television because we have the address of the set-top box, we know the postal code on which that set-top box resides. If an advertiser was doing a direct mailing to postal codes based on demographics, they could do the same targeting via television.”
The reward for advertisers, he said, is “greater efficiency” for their advertising messages. “Where before [TV advertising] was a blunt instrument, it can now be a much more focused, targeted and measurable instrument.”
But Ian MacLean, vice-president of communications for media services firm Media Experts and one of the principals in the advanced TV service Etc.tv, said that what advertisers really crave is a cross-country rollout of such a service.
“Trials are well and good, but what advertisers really want is a national deployment of advanced TV advertising,” said MacLean. “That’s really going to be the exciting news–when an advertiser is able to address specific messages by geography, according to psychographics and demographics across the entire Canadian footprint.
Perrotta said there’s “no question” that addressable advertising will eventually make its way to Canada.
While TV remains Canada’s leading advertising medium, with 2011 revenues projected to grow 5% to $3.6 billion according to the latest ad spend forecast from ZenithOptimedia, the internet continues to close the gap based in large part on its addressable advertising capabilities.
