Thursday New Tools Feature: Increasingly Capable Cable

The New York Times reports this week that the cable TV provider Cablevision is introducing a new technology that allows for targeted marketing customized for individual households:

Beginning with 500,000 homes in Brooklyn, the Bronx and some New Jersey areas, Cablevision will use its targeting technology to route ads to specific households based on data about income, ethnicity, gender or whether the homeowner has children or pets.

The technology requires no hardware or installation in a subscriber’s home, so viewers may not realize they are seeing ads different from a neighbor’s. But during the same show, a 50-something male may see an ad for, say, high-end speakers from Best Buy, while his neighbors with children may see one for a Best Buy video game.

While at the moment this only applies for 500,000 Cablevision subscribers in the tri-state area, it seems likely that it will quickly spread. Cablevision intends to expand the service to all of its 3.1 million customers assuming the trial goes well. And initial results suggest that it will:

Cablevision tested the technology by promoting its own services with targeted and untargeted ads. In the eight-month test, the targeted ads brought in new subscriptions at a significantly higher rate than untargeted ads.

Companies, aware that their advertising dollars are threatened by the rise of DVRs, the hyper-saturation of today's media environment, and the drop in impulsive buys due to the recession, are looking for creative and effective ways to market their products more precisely. Those in the political sphere would be wise to take notice as well.

Targeted television marketing is not just limited to cable, either; streaming internet-based TV services, like the upcoming ZillionTV set-top box, allow for similar levels of precision targeting:

The pitch to advertisers is precise targeting: To get high ad prices to pay for all this, ZillionTV will watch your viewing habits, merge them with data about you it buys elsewhere, and use all that information to aim ads at certain groups of viewers. Users will also be asked to select categories of products they would like to see ads about. The ad-supported content will have half the number of commercials as broadcast television, which is still more than online services, like Hulu, have now. And you can’t skip past the commercials.

NDN and the New Politics Institute have long written about the benefits of cable and targeted marketing. Staying on top of television's evolution, as it becomes increasingly personalized and intertwined with Web video, will be critical for any candidate or organization that wants to advertise effectively in a 21st century media environment. 

To learn more about how to target your TV advertising, see our papers "Buy Cable Smart" and "An Introduction to Microtargeting in Politics," and watch this excellent and incredibly enlightening video of Amy Gershkoff of Changing Targets Media from our recent NDN/NPI event, "New Tools for a New Era."