Julian Clover looks forward to a long weekend in Amsterdam as IBC 2008 prepares to open its doors.
One week to go before IBC, the telephone just keeps on ringing, and the inbox is full. Sometimes the emails are even relevant to items we report on. When they are one phrase keeps popping up. Targeted advertising is now back in vogue.
For a market that has hardly got to grips with local ad insertion, the prospect of targeted advertising is quite a leap forward. In my kitchen a new toy is an internet radio on which I can listen to stations from all over the world. Somehow a couple of presets have found themselves assigned to local stations. However much automation takes over – I noticed Oxford’s Jack FM parodying the fact that it was cutting down on the talk because of the credit crunch – local always brings something extra to the party. Reciva, the Cambridge-based technology company that provides the software for many of the Internet Radio devices on the market, is also exploring ad insertion. So when listening to WXRV in the United States there would still be advertisements for the local pet shop.
Targeted advertising can in theory go right down to your street, giving you advertisements based on your postcode, or perhaps from a marketing survey you have consented to. Whatever TV station you turned to there would be no escape from that Ford advert with implausibly good looking musicians that seem to punctuate every commercial break on Sky Sports.
BBC and ITV place all of their regional variations on satellite with good cause, but so too Channel 4, which although it has no regional programming does split its advertising. There are also increasing numbers of channels tapping into the Irish market by providing local advertising windows there; among them Living, Nickelodeon, MTV, Sky1, Sky News, Sky Sports, NASN and even Bubble Hits.
Arguably the 25% of Sky homes that have the Sky+ PVR now represent a great enough a base to make local storage of commercials a possibility. Such thoughts will be far from the minds of the protagonists of IPTV that will again be out in Amsterdam.
Three years back IPTV was among the big new technologies that were being showcased alongside the new HDTV, Mobile TV and MPEG-4 technologies. The latter has had the greatest success and has quietly built its reputation in the background. Last week the technology even picked up its own Primetime Emmy Award. It is HDTV and mobile that still need to do the work, though my hunch is that all the technologies will be with us for a while to come.
