<font color="#ff0000">Guest Article: </font> Vikas Singh: IPTV -- It all Ads up

Addressable advertising over IPTV has significant advantages over traditional TV advertising, for consumers, advertisers, and service providers

For TV viewers in the country, IPTV (Internet Protocol Television) -- TV delivered across a private IP network to a subscriber's broadband access point and viewed on a television set -- is here to stay as an alternative TV delivery platform. Even though it is early days and early numbers, TV viewers have appreciated three things about IPTV -- interactivity, personalisation and flexibility.

It is not surprising that this flexible nature of IPTV is expected to be the killer application that would attract advertisers and to breathe new life into tired, old TV advertising formats. Targeted advertising or addressable advertising has the potential to give TV viewers a more relevant experience, while at the same time, help to attract advertisers and generate revenue for the service providers involved.

The IPTV platform offers advertisers the best of both worlds. It offers the immersive and proven impact of traditional television, with the added benefit of being able to enhance it with interactivity. It also offers the addressability and accountability of advertising in the Internet world, enabling the targeting of individual homes, personalized advertising and measurement of an advertisement's impact.

In addition, advertising on IPTV has the potential to be dramatically different from the 'traditional' TV experience. IPTV enables content to be targeted according to different factors, the first of which is geography.

Because of the return path possibility on IP, it also becomes possible to discover viewing behaviour in real time, without the consumer having to give away potentially sensitive personal data. Therefore, the service provider would be able to see whether the IP address associated with a particular device is consistently watching a genre of programmes.

This information could be used not only to offer certain kinds of content, but also to help service providers to offer advertisers a means to deliver more relevant advertising. For instance, a household that is a regular consumer of holiday programmes, but never watches any children's TV, could be targeted to receive ads about holidays, but de-selected to see any ads aimed at families. Furthermore, if consumers also opt in to provide additional information about themselves, profiling of ads could become even more detailed.

This tailored approach has advantages all round. It excludes the danger of advertisers falling into a 'spray and pray' approach to TV advertising. Frequency capping can be used to ensure that a viewer only sees an ad a certain number of times, or to create serialised ads where viewers see episodes in sequence.

The same brand ad could have different sequences depending on the viewer -- for instance, a city hatchback car with one message for young people, then a different message and visuals for an older audience. Thus, viewers would be less likely to skip ads.

As far as IPTV operators are concerned, these new, more engaging formats can help to attract advertisers, who are becoming increasingly disillusioned with the return-on-investment from traditional TV advertising.

Addressable advertising means less wastage, which apart from being more cost-effective for big brand advertisers, also brings TV promotion within the grasp of a whole new pool of businesses, who would have previously found TV too unfocused and expensive.

Finally, the data on viewing habits of different IP addresses can be used to create the basis for more sophisticated measurement tools. Moreover, the same ad avail (or timeslot) can be targeted at different viewers, and most importantly, sold to different advertisers, making this a highly attractive business model for broadcasters.

Of course, the viewers themselves also benefit from seeing more relevant, and hopefully, more enjoyable advertising. If consumers are presented with more relevant advertising, they are more likely to accept its presence outside of traditional TV. This, in turn, makes advertising a more valuable revenue stream for service providers.

Some IPTV operators, broadcasters and advertising agencies have already explored addressable advertising opportunities. The world's first targeted TV advertising campaign over IPTV took place in late 2007, involving UK broadcaster Channel 4, the UK IPTV network Inuk, media agency Mediacom and Packet Vision.

Using an ad from an existing financial sector client, the campaign ran daily on Channel 4 for two weeks. It specifically targeted university students across the UK, so that during the same 40 seconds in which the ad spot ran, students saw an ad from a brand different from what the rest of the viewing population saw.

These early experiences are just the beginning. To earn its place, IPTV cannot be another 'me too' delivery vehicle; it has to offer something different, as well as make money for its stakeholders. Addressable advertising could be the key to making IPTV a truly profitable medium.

(The author is chief marketing officer - telemedia services, Bharti Airtel.)