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Television Advertising

Comcast, Charter and ViacomCBS Join Forces to Make TV Commercials More Targeted (wsj.com) 44

Posted by BeauHD from the targeted-advertising dept.
wyattstorch516 writes: Comcast has spun off its blockchain division and is now partnering with Spectrum Reach (the advertising sales division of Charter Communications) and Viacom. Customized ad delivery in the TV space has significantly lagged the technology for online video providers such as Youtube. Blockgraph holds out the promise that will allow advertisers to target key demographics while safeguarding subscriber information. Can this help prop up the declining broadcast video market? One-third of Blockgraph will now be owned by each company. Blockgraph Chief Executive Jason Manningham says the platform will help brands and ad-inventory sellers match data sets without sharing too much personal data on the viewers.

"For instance, if a car maker buys a data set of people in the market for a car, it could use Blockgraph's technology to match that list up with cable subscribers based on their home address," reports The Wall Street Journal, citing Manningham. "The car company could use this data either to learn which programs and time of day draw more viewers from their desired audience, or to buy ads targeted only at households on the in-market list."
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Comcast, Charter and ViacomCBS Join Forces to Make TV Commercials More Targeted More

Comcast, Charter and ViacomCBS Join Forces to Make TV Commercials More Targeted

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  • Fantastic! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by gavron ( 1300111 ) on Saturday May 30, 2020 @05:12AM (#60124520)

    You know what's missing from the WSJ article: How this will -in any way- benefit consumers. Nothing.
    Sure, it will benefit the legacy players to have more data to target ads, and now car mfgs will be in on it.

    I can't wait for my cable box to tell my car manufacturer what I watch on TV! I can only imagine good things from this.
    - If I watch too PBS the price of the car should be quoted higher?
    - If I watch the TVGuide Channel the price of the car should be quoted higher?
    - If I watch retro stuff like Gilligan's Island then I don't need the latest sound system?

    What if it worked in reverse. Blockchain data, if shared amongst all "partners" (co-owners) does that
    - If I drive like a speed demon, show me ads on performance and tuning mods for my specific car?
    - If I drive like an old Sunday driver, show me ads on which church is closer?

    There's no end of fun with data sharing. This is an evil idea. Of course it would come from Comcast, Charter, and the rest of the Big Content companies (Viacom).

    Count me out. I have no "smart" appliances, and the day my car dies I'll be buying another one that doesn't call the mothership.

    Ehud "It was 110F in Tucson today but I still maintain my sense of cord-cuttingness" Gavron

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Z00L00K ( 682162 )

      Is anyone really watching or reacting to ads these days?

      Ads have been so frequent and intrusive now that people no longer react to them.

      • Unfortunately advertising isn't really about getting a reaction from the watchers, they're about building unconscious recognition of a brand or a product to affect future behaviour. It's mere exposure effect [wikipedia.org] at its worst.

        • Unfortunately advertising isn't really about getting a reaction from the watchers, they're about building unconscious recognition of a brand or a product to affect future behaviour.

          Er ... OK, but we are already saturated with brand recogntion. They mentioned cars, but who hasn't already heard of Ford, BMW, Mercedes, Chrysler, VW etc etc? Maybe some undiscovered tribesmen in an undiscovered jungle somewhere?

          There are some very small car brands that don't generally advertise, like Morgan (but I've heard of them anyway), but the reason I don't buy a Morgan is not because I don't get targeted ads about them on TV, it's because I don't want an open topped sports car with 1930's styling

          • It's not about the conscious recognition of the brand. They use advertising to refresh their subconscious signals attached to their brand. They aren't trying to get you to buy something new; they want you to keep buying the same old crap as always so they can pad their pocketbooks with predictable profits.
        • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Bigbutt ( 65939 )

        I’m more and more angry at Atlassian because of their incessant youtube ads. That smarmy announcer needs a good smack in the back of the head,

        Otherwise I’m one of those that stopped watching TV 8 years ago when my TV watching wife bailed and moved to Florida. And no, no streaming services other than the occasional youtube video when I’m trying to learn something; ELK, New Relic, Grafana, Reaper, where the iDrac6 Express goes in a R410, guitar tips from Rick Beato, etc.

        [John]

      • "Is anyone really watching or reacting to ads these days?"

        Even if I have Amazon Prime and Netflix, I watch everything downloaded by uTorrent, no ads seen since last millennium.
        My RSS feeder downloads automatically all the series I'm following, so It's all in one folder.

      • Ads have been so frequent and intrusive now that people no longer react to them.

        It's not just ads that are ignored. Text messages are not effective [fastcompany.com] at reminding people to take even their important medication:

        “No matter how we looked at [the data] in our study, the text messaging was not effective,” says Dawn Hershman, Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology at Columbia University Medical Center, who helped lead the study. “What we found was you could see absolutely no benefit from the inte

    • They got troubles I want to see fake/parody commercials taking the piss out of well known brands. I buy most things second hand/used, if new, online. If its a brandname, it will turn up at some discount outlet or dumpster dive I use comparison engines As a male - I dont buy much new stuff - except the local hardware store. I cant stand TV commercials, so I own about 2000 DVD's. I dont use Facebook or Twitter, Dont watch much sport - better downloaded later. I go overseas for dental medical work and clothes

      • Reruns of StarTrek and Lost in space/ retro are simply not shown anymore I have never seen ads for measure and get mailed clothes/shirts on TV.

        You need a roof antenna. There are a bunch of old retro content channels on the subcarriers of many broadcast stations. MeTV runs Lost in Space and Star Trek TOS.

        Combine a tuner with MythTV on an old computer and you can record anything over the air and autoskip all commercials. MythTV works incredibly well as a DVR and the autoskip is unreal it works so well.

    • You know what's missing from the WSJ article: How this will -in any way- benefit consumers.

      Ads are not meant to benefit consumers.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • You know what's missing from the WSJ article: How this will -in any way- benefit consumers.

      Well, if this technology is smart enough to cut down on the number of My Pillow ads that I have to skip over, then I'd consider it a win just for that.

    • No, it will only benefit the ad companies. The car companies buying the ads will think they're effective based only on conversion rates, but they will fail to properly account for the fact that the ads are being given to people who are already likely to buy a car - they won't grow the market with targeted ads.

      And it gets worse. Ad companies will have an incentive to deliver ads for toyota not just to people "likely to buy a car", but also to people likely to buy a toyota. But those people were already likel

  • "Can this help prop up the declining broadcast video market?" asks the summary. If their solution is more advertising or just making ads more targeted, then no it won't. People are fed up of paying for a service and then being forced to sit through tons of ads, this move will accelerate the migration of customers away from their service and towards streaming services (that generally don't show many (if any) ads to customers that pay them enough). How do the executives at Comcast/Viacom not understand thi

    • Ads are an instant back button or closed tab for me (depending on level of invasiveness).

      If I see it briefly, it might be helpful to the brand doing the advertising in the long run, but it's going to cause me to avoid your business. I really would rather pay you than deal with advertising.

  • I'm going to be skipping a lot more targeted ads now? The last ad I actually watched was probably back in the Super Bowl.

  • >"Can this help prop up the declining broadcast video market?"

    I have no idea, but I doubt it. I rarely watch "commercials." Have been using TiVo for 18 years. Prior to that, I would record everything to VHS and watch it on my terms (which also including skipping commercials). I am guessing there are more and more people like me, who refuse to submit to forced content.

    When I want to buy something, I perform research. Prior to that, bombarding me with "emotional information" about products I don't wan

  • When the new ATSC 3.0 broadcast standard become widely available, they will be able to target ads on Antenna TV too.

    • Only for Hybrid TV.

      ...the television receiver's ability to combine over-the-air reception with broadband connectivity and interactive applications

      No backchannel, no surveillance.

  • Viewers join forces to make TV commercials even more insignificant than they already are.

    How long is it gonna take you to notice? We don't want your ads. And we finally have a way to circumvent them. You're no longer the only source of moving picture entertainment we can enjoy at home. And the other offer we have is not subjecting us to shit we don't want to see every other minute. We opted for that one BECAUSE of that reason.

    Target it all you like, it still remains irrelevant. If you want to offer me that

  • Uncanny valley (Score:3)

    by sonamchauhan ( 587356 ) <sonamc@NOsPam.gmail.com> on Saturday May 30, 2020 @07:49AM (#60124778) Journal

    You know the creeeep factor with online ads? At a particular time, you were interested in something. Now ads for that same something follow you around like a lost puppy?

    It's the uncanny valley concept but applied to ads. Ads can be sort of helpful up to a point --- like... advertise products for in the country I'm in, in a language I understand, and in roughly the correct economic strata (don't advertise private jets to me). But once they get more targeted - like ads for a Hawaii vacation that I just got back from -- it gets uncanny and counterproductive for me and the advertiser both.

    Google deals with this by putting an interactive button on its ads. ("Dont show this ad - ad not suitable" , etc). The cable networks don't do similar navel-gazing interaction with ads ("Am I bothering you? Am I nice to you). So unless they start using those four (red/green/yellow?) buttons on the remote for meta-interaction, not just to buy something, they're going to creep out customers.

    It's sort of a losing concept anyway - customers don't want to have to interact with and dismiss ads, and pay for the honor. This may just push more people to Netflix and ad-free streaming.

    If the cable networks really wanted to do this properly, they'd implement a digital concierge that used a conversational interface to get to know you and your interests - maybe with video and voice recognition, and came back with better-targeted content of interest to you (such as news of what's up with your high school pals - pulled from your yearbook, your photos, the news, LinkedIn and Facebook) - not just ads. That way the uncanny valley would be mitigated somewhat -- you'd have actual 2-way interaction would have some sort representation. But they'd rather go for the low hanging fruit.... AD-BOMBING via data analytics! Typical.

    • On the one hand, so many cases of tracking between sites is unsettling. On the other hand, the complete inability to analyze that tracking even when the advertisers have financial incentive to do so is a relief.

  • I watch no ads. Period. The day I am forced to watch ads in a pay-service is the day I cancel my subscription - I'd rather watch no shows than endure ads to watch shows.

  • Surely "Customized ad delivery in the Cable TV space".

    Difficult to target me for ads when only I know what off-air channel I tuned to. An no, my TV is not internet connected so no phoning home for pattern matching either.

  • The rest of the world joins forces to eliminate TV.

    These guys are insane. Targeted ads may make advertisers happier, but customers will continue to drop these deprecated TV services in mass. Twice the cost of modern publishing services, half the visual quality, and 25% is filled with commercials. I cannot seriously imagine spending 25% of each hour watching commercials.

    Hard to believe that these guys are still holding on to their pipe-dream instead of trying to compete.

  • When I worked at the Discovery Channel in Canada. A Waterloo-based firm was pitching targeted ads (mainly by set-top postal code) to us and other broadcasters, now that people had these new-fangled "digital set-top boxes" in their homes. Unfortunately you also have to get cable companies to agree (one by one) and advertisers who care (not many). And who gets what cut of the money now? This only works in companies that are well vertically integrated. So this idea has been around for two decades, and still ha
    • Cable companies have been doing this for at least 15 years now. Virtually every medium to large cable company does targeted ads for the local ad buys. This will help enable targeted ads on the national feeds by sharing demographic data while using blockchain to maintain privacy.
  • Seriously, back when I was watching Dish/regular TV/etc, this would have been preferable. Why? Because the ads would have more of my interest. Right now, TV ads are like the newspaper ads; dull; witless; and almost always have NOTHING to do with anybody in our household. Just like the Ads on my webpages. I see something relevant, as opposed to not. It would have been nice to never see another medical or legal advertisement.

    With that said, the 1 major issue that I can see on this is that politicians, lobb

    • I’m the opposite - if I’m going to see an ad (which is questionable anyway), I’d just as soon it be random. Makes it easier to ignore.

      If ads were of better quality - interesting, entertaining, or funny in some way - I wouldn’t be so averse to them. But advertisements mostly suck. That’s always been true, but my anecdotal experience makes me think they suck more now than they used to.

  • Really, cable TV is still a Thing? Must be mostly old boomers that have it. xD
    In all seriousness: do they really think they can force people to watch commercials? Never could, can't now, never will. Commercial-watchers are the only ones who watch commercials, the rest of us, they don't even register on our consciousness.
    I have an antenna and TiVo. Maybe I see the tail end of some commercial, but it never registers on me anyway. I know I'm not the only one either.
    All you 'streaming' people: do you even se

    • I must admit my first response to this story was to wonder when the last time was that I saw a TV commercial.

      A few weeks back, I read a story about how Apple had one some major advertising award for a recent commercial. I went and intentionally watched it... and actually thought it was well done. But, the thing is - up until then, I was completely unaware of this major, high-production ad from one of the biggest companies on earth. And it struck me how much the world has changed in less than 20 years, back

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