A new world of advertising may be coming to a home near you. Recently, Charter Communications, Inc. launched a field pilot for dynamic OnDemand advertising in St. Louis, Missouri. St Louis is the largest media market to date to deploy dynamic on demand advertising and follows the successful completion of the company's lab trial in which advertising was dynamically inserted into on demand programs, enabling individual ad copy to be refreshed and rotated among viewer sessions within minutes. Atlas, C-COR, Harmonic and TVN Entertainment Corporation are full participants for the software, hardware and workflow management required to implement this new system.
"Charter is now taking dynamic ad insertion to the next phase, which means deploying it as a field pilot focusing on delivering dynamic on demand advertising built instantly in response to viewers' desires, all based on play lists by viewer sessions," said Todd A. Stewart, Charter's Corporate Vice President of National Advertising Sales and Development. "This is a breakthrough that entirely changes the landscape of on demand television advertising," said Mr. Stewart.
The field pilot was deployed in Charter's St. Louis metropolitan market in late October. Charter is partnering with Ogilvy North America whose national client is a participant in the pilot. Mediaedge:cia also has a client participating. Maria Mandel, Partner, Executive Director Digital Innovation for OgilvyInteractive, said, "We are excited by the potential of dynamic on demand television advertising and are looking forward learning its targeting and optimization capabilities."
Commercial content provided by advertisers is being placed in pre- and post-roll positions around free on demand content provided by Hollywood.com Television and Vehix.com. Video sessions are created as they are ordered and allow ad copy updates without having to incur the cost of re-encoding and re-distribution. The ultimate goal is to demonstrate the ability to immediately direct targeted messages to the right audience at the right time and reduce lead time from weeks to days. In the past, most video on-demand advertising was tied to specific content for the run of the ad, which forced advertisers to commit to a lead time of several weeks and run generic copy.
"This is an exciting time for advertisers using Charter OnDemand," said Mr. Stewart. "When this product is fully developed and launched, advertisers will reach the audience they want, and viewers will see more of the products they actually desire."
You can read more about the advertising pilot in this Charter press release.
