Your TV Will Soon Know All About You

In the late 1980s, Time Inc., among the nation’s greatest senders of junk mail, figured out, in an epochal target marketing advance, how to replace “occupant” on each letter with the actual name of the recipient. A decade later, digital media figured out how to target relevant ads to specific users (if you’ve recently bought a shirt, by gum, you’ll see more shirts ads).

Targeted advertising is coming to television, and that 

could be a very big deal.

(Photo: Brett T. Roseman for USA TODAY)

Such was the revolution in advertising: not only could an advertiser zoom in on a customer, the advertiser no longer had to pay for people who were unlikely to become customers.

Television, with all ad spots seen by all viewers, remained the outlier — excluded from the single largest pool of advertising money: direct marketing budgets — another reason why its end times have become a regular prediction.

Well, voilà! Albeit quite a long-time-coming voilà.

When senior executive Michael Kubin joined Invidi, a start-up proposing to embed targeting software in cable boxes in 2003, “it seemed,” said Kubin, “like a revolution was about to happen.”

Twelve years later, with the WPP-Google-DirectTV-Dish Network-NBC-Verizon-backed company’s software shortly to reach two-thirds of the nation’s set-top boxes and smart TV households — finally overcoming software and industry intramural issues, as well as the reliable resistance of salesman who are already selling out their inventory, thanks — it may be.

Sitting in a Greek restaurant on West 44th Street in Manhattan, Kubin and Howard Fiderer, Invidi’s product manager, both 60-somethings with long media careers, seem quite unlike the usual promoters of technological transformation. And yet, here they are, more surprised then triumphant, on the cusp of advertising’s holy grail: absolute television addressability.

That is, in long-fretted-about dystopian terms, your television will know who you are, what you like and who you vote for, and can individually send you an ad tailored to your desires.

Read the rest of the story HERE.

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