QABy Thomas Haire ( thaire@questex.com)
Cablevision Expands Addressable Advertising
to N.Y. Cable Viewers
NEW YORK — Cablevision, New York City’s leading cable service, announced the expansion of its addressable advertising capabilities following a successful test with 100,000 subscribers. The
expansion of the technology, which was created by New York-based
Visible World, will now allow advertisers to reach more than 500,000
Cablevision subscribers. Recently, Response chatted with David Kline, president and chief operating
officer at Rainbow Advertising Sales Corp. (Cablevision and Rainbow’s advertising sales unit) and Tara
Walpert Levy, president of Visible World, about the new technology.
How did the idea for Cablevision to test
addressable advertising come about?
How did Visible World and Cablevision
work together for the test?
DAVID KLINE: Cablevision saw this as a
way to make advertising more relevant to
our cable customers and more effective
for our advertising partners. We saw this
test as an opportunity to direct the most
relevant, and therefore most valuable, ads
to TV viewers, and by working with Visible
World and its software solution, we were
able to pursue our goal.
TARA WALPERT LEVY: It was a two-fold
decision, I believe. Advertising has become
an increasingly important growth area
for cable companies as they mature, and
Cablevision was excited about the ways
our technology could drive more business.
Second, the idea of using this technology
for its own marketing organizations was
also very appealing.
How did the process of creating the
initial trial work? How expansive was it?
KLINE: We looked at our own internal marketing needs and decided that we wanted
to reach subscribers who had one, two or
all three of Cablevision’s Triple Play products. By directing ads to these subscribers,
specifically based on their level of existing
service, Cablevision was able to see a
double-digit lift in sales.
LEVY: Cablevision is a fantastic partner,
but as a business they are very cross-functional. There are sales, marketing,
engineering, operations, production and
more. Together, we had to understand what
all of these different groups want? One was
to demonstrate the capability of the technology to be rolled out in a scalable fashion
— in essence, creating an example to the
entire cable industry how it could be done.
Also, the business rationale was strong
enough for Cablevision. We worked with
them on segmentation and their targeted
approach. As David said, this type of
addressable advertising is generating high
double-digit lifts. Cablevision has become
a vocal supporter of this technology — its
quality, reliability and ability to scale.
How did Cablevision measure the benefits of the trial against non-addressable
advertising? How did Visible World and
its technology help with the measurement process?
KLINE: The trial successfully illustrated the
effectiveness and efficiency of addressable
advertising, showing a double-digit lift
in sales compared with non-addressable
advertising.
LEVY: What Cablevision cared most about
was sales impact. Their clients are looking
at sales impact, response impact, engagement impact. Visible World supports these
goals in any way possible.
How did Visible World’s technology
allow Cablevision — and how it may
allow other providers — to have success with addressable TV advertising?
LEVY: There have been a couple of primary
constraints that have limited rollout in the
past — bandwidth and storage on set-top
boxes. Ours is the only solution that’s ever
moved on a trial to deployment. We’ve
done some unique things to minimize that
bandwidth requirement, allocating bandwidth more tightly because of the relatively
small size of application. The Cablevision
test allowed us to reach 10-15 percent
of inventory across 30 networks. There
were no operational resource issues for
Cablevision. Our strong operations, sales
and account management teams work with
Cablevision closely on functionality.
An expansion of the deployment
was announced in March, with more
than 500,000 households expected
to receive addressable ads by early
2010. How is that expansion going? Are
results so far holding up to the test
results that prompted the expansion?
KLINE: The expansion is going well. This is
no longer a trial; addressable advertising
is real, up and running with advertisers on
board and renewals in place.
