Cable TV’s Targeted & Interactive Ads: Benefiting from a “enormous fire-hose of data”

excerpt from Advanced Advertising.  Linda Hardesty.  Cablefax.  April 1, 2009:  “There’s a lot of technology in place for data collection,” said Ross [Doug Ross, Cisco’s VP of business development in the service provider video technology group]. “We can collect almost an unimaginable amount of data at a granular level. The industry grapples with what’s the right architecture that would make this enormous fire-hose of data more useful.”

“The challenge is the enormity of that whole set of data,” agreed Woidke [Paul Woidke, SVP and general manager of advanced advertising at Open TV – and chair of SCTE Digital Video Subcommittee (DVS) Working Group 5]. “Eighty-five percent of homes in the U.S. have some kind of satellite or wired connection with a potential return path.”

Instead of just getting Nielson data for a selected sample of homes, a cable operator could gather data from all its subs and know what people watched, when they watched it, and how they behaved in terms of pausing, rewinding and fast- forwarding.

Cable’s Big Six Canoe Ventures & Privacy: “We can certainly compete with a cookie”

That quote is attributed to David Verklin, CEO of Canoe Ventures, when he spoke at a recent industry marketing event.  As noted by Inside the Marketers Studio, Mr. Verklin said that:

I think the TV can do a pretty good job at targeting. “We can certainly compete with a cookie.” Can tie it back to set top boxes, loyalty cards. 90% of grocery shopping happens with loyalty cards.

Cable Giants Canoe Ventures and Your Set-top Box Data [Annals of Telling Congress One Thing, But Insiders Another]

From a November 2008 report on Canoe CEO David Verklin’s speech at the “NewTeeVee Live” conference.  Excerpts:  Canoe Ventures outlined its strategy today at the NewTeeVee Live conference in San Francisco, where David Verklin, the CEO, outlined the cable industry’s answer to the competition from online video…“Data is the new creative,” Verklin said. He said Canoe thinks the key to that data is the set-top box that’s already hooked up to the televison. That box can tell advertisers exactly how many people are watching an ad.

And this excerpt on Comcast’s data mining warehouse from a January 2009 report in Multichannel News.  Excerpt:  Comcast has sketched out plans for a gigantic database called “TV Warehouse,” able to store a full year of statistics gathered from digital set-tops in more than 16 million households nationwide, according to an industry executive familiar with the project.  TV Warehouse, envisioned as having a massive 500 Terabytes of storage, would then feed up to a database even broader in scope operated by Canoe Ventures, the advanced-advertising venture formed by Comcast and five other large MSOs.  The idea: to give advertisers an enormous set of actual viewing metrics — showing exactly what millions of cable customers watched and when — as opposed to representative samples.

Canoe CEO David Verklin has said the venture expects in the near future to provide viewing metrics for 32 million U.S. cable households, representing about 57 million set-tops.  “One of the first things we must do is bring set-top data into the marketplace and make that the currency,” Verklin said, speaking last November on a panel at the CTAM Summit.  Detailed audience measurement metrics, in Verklin’s view, are crucial to Canoe’s aims to sell interactive-TV services and deliver ads that are “addressable” to individual set-tops.

and an excerpt from an interview with Canoe’s chief technological exec Arthur Orduna.  Worth thinking about the implications:
And when a viewer does respond, or requests information, what happens?

[Orduna]:  There the local system comes into play, and so does Canoe, actually. Because whatever I click will be collected into a separate aggregation server by the MSO or the system. That information would then be sent to a centralized Canoe aggregation server, because we’d be managing all the information for that particular campaign. And then whatever would need to be done with that data, whether it would need to be presented back to the subscriber, or whether it would be compiled for fulfillment or reporting, that would be Canoe’s responsibility.

Congressional Internet Caucus and the State of the Mobile Net: Corporate Donors Influence Group’s Agenda, Leaving Public Vulnerable to Loss of Privacy

When will members of the Congressional Internet Caucus wake up and address the role its special interest dominated “Advisory” Committee is playing?  The Caucus is holding a “State of the Mobile Net” conference on April 23.  It’s doubtful Congress will be receiving the unbiased information they need, given that the sponsors of the event are the leading companies engaged in mobile marketing and data collection.  As typical of the “business model” crafted by the Center for Democracy and Technology connected group known as the Internet Education Foundation, the event prominently acknowledges its  Platinum” sponsors: the CTIA lobby group, Google, Microsoft and Verizon.  Gold” sponsors are AT&T, Nokia, T-Mobile.  There is also a category called “promotional” sponsors which lists Yahoo and several others.

It’s highly unlikely that the meeting will discuss the real issues challenging consumer privacy and welfare on the mobile Internet (including, we expect, the recent CDD/USPIRG complaint filed at the FTC– which has helped launch an investigation into that market).   The Advisory Caucus is run by the Internet Education Foundation, whose board members include representatives from Google, Verizon, Comcast, Microsoft, Recording Industry of America, and the Consumer Electronics Association. So the line-up of speakers is crafted to make sure that corporate donor feathers–and their willingness to continue to financially contribute–aren’t ruffled.  On the privacy panel for the event we have, of course, a representative from CDT.   There are also mobile marketers–including Yahoo and loopt.  There is the DLA Piper law firm that advocates for industry and a lone academic. Consumers and citizens deserve better from Congress.

PS:  As an example of how incredibly biased the Advisory Committee to the Congressional Net Caucus is, look at the description and speaker line-up of its recent briefing on online advertising.  A supposed “unbiased” event,  it featured industry lobbyists and several groups funded by online marketers!  Incredibly shameful!

Advisory Committee to the Congressional Internet Caucus

Anatomy of Online Advertising: Understanding the Privacy Debate
March 30, 2009…The purpose of the briefing is to provide an unbiased foundation for understanding the various privacy issues that Congress will debate in the context of online advertising.

Panelists:

* Paula Bruening, Hunton & Williams
* Maureen Cooney, TRUSTe
* Michael Engelhardt, Adobe Systems
* Tim Lordan, Congressional Internet Caucus Advisory Committee
* Jules Polonetsky, Future of Privacy
* Heather West, Center for Democracy & Technology
* Mike Zaneis, Interactive Advertising Bureau

Big Brands Tracking Your `Tweets’: Online Marketing Tool Can Help Comcast & Others ID “brand allies and foes” [ Annals of Web Analytics]

excerpt:  Omniture SiteCatalyst now integrates with Twitter to let online marketers monitor and measure tweets. The feature lets marketers import data from Twitter feeds… It tracks preset keywords to monitor who is talking about their brand.

The SiteCatalyst feature also helps identify brand advocates and cynics…

At a recent Omniture Summit, the telecom firm Comcast talked about being able to identify brand allies and foes, according to Matt Langie, senior director of product marketing, Omniture. …

According to Forrester, nearly 5 million people use Twitter, where users send frequent, short updates to followers. Many of the followers look to tie themselves to the brand by joining in on the conversation.

The SiteCatalyst integration with Twitter enables marketers to take advantage of a real-time alert feature to send emails and SMS messages to mobile devices based on pre-determined criteria, such as a spike in mentions of brand-related terms…”

Omniture SiteCatalyst Integrates With Twitter.  Laurie Sullivan.  Online Media Daily.  March 6, 2009

The real digital TV transition: Why TV “Advanced Advertising” [aka Project Canoe] Raises Privacy & Consumer Protection Concerns

The cable and telephone industry have Google envy.  These broadband communications giants recognize that online advertising companies such as Google and Yahoo have created an enormous market for themselves through the delivery of online ads.  Comcast, Time Warner, Verizon and others want to use their Bush Administration-given broadband monopoly status to gain a significant share of this market.  Cable giants are also working together to transform television so it can better compete with online, and target viewers with more precision and in-depth ads.  The goal–for cable, phone and online ad companies–is to eventually provide a seamless system that tracks, profiles and targets us across every “screen,” including TV, PC and mobile.

Comcast is heavily investing for such a viewer/user tracking world.  It has plans, according to the trade publication Multichannel News to create a “gigantic database called “TV Warehouse,” able to store a full year of statistics gathered from digital set-tops in more than 16 million households nationwide…TV Warehouse, envisioned as having a massive 500 Terabytes of storage, would then feed up to a database even broader in scope operated by Canoe Ventures, the advanced-advertising venture formed by Comcast and five other large MSOs.  The idea: to give advertisers an enormous set of actual viewing metrics — showing exactly what millions of cable customers watched and when — as opposed to representative samples.”

Not surprisingly, Comcast’s Brian Roberts has said his company should no longer be viewed as merely a provider of television:  “Over the last few years we have successfully transformed Comcast from a cable company into a new products company that utilizes one infrastructure to deliver a growing number of products.”  Advanced Advertising, which is what the cable industry’s technical consortium known as CableLabs calls it, is one of the major products Comcast and others will soon provide.  According to CableLabs, “Advertising is growing in importance for cable operators. CableLabs is currently supporting activity in four areas designed to create new revenue opportunities around advanced advertising technologies. These areas are digital ad insertion, interactive advertising, reporting, and addressability.”   Cable executives are working with advertising companies to “…agree on a valuation metric. What’s a click worth?”

But the core concern with Advanced Advertising is the tracking of viewers, including the use of internal and outside databases for targeting. Comcast Spotlight, for example, offers marketers access to a broad range of databases for more precise targeting. Acxiom offers cable and other providers a host of database segmentation services, including its Personicx VisionScape. “With PersonicX VisionScape, marketers have at your fingertips real-time access to a wealth of information… that can help them understand more about their customers – what type of products they use, their purchasing behaviors, their channel and media preferences.  The PersonicX household-level segmentation system is built with InfoBase-Xâ„¢ data and places almost every U.S. household into one of 70 distinctive segments and 21 life stage groups based on specific consumer behavior and demographic characteristics.”

Cable’s work to create a more powerful viewer data collection and targeting system has been out of public and policymaker view.  Cable engineers have been working  together to perfect the technology that will allow it to merge “content and subscriber metadata for targeting zones (or, in a unicast environment, for targeting individuals) to bring the right ad to the right consumer at the right time.”

The phone and cable companies, knowing that the 1984 Cable Communications Act contains privacy safeguards for interactive TV ads and aware of the current debate on behavioral targeting, claims that such data collection and targeting will be anonymous and could include an “opt-in.”  We don’t believe any cable or phone consumer is being told the extent of the plans underway to track and target them.  For example, Alcatel’s product for IPTV related advanced advertising explains that:
“To capture the full revenue potential of targeted and interactive advertising, IPTV providers need to ensure that the following critical actions are addressed:

  • Capture and measure — The network must be able to collect “opt-in” subscriber information from a broad range of databases, which advertisers will use to reach specific “targeted” markets. This anonymous data includes usage patterns, subscriptions, demographics, location, presence and preferences — including how, when and where advertising messages are delivered, along with the type of device that is used. In addition, accurate measurement capabilities are needed that can verify audience response and track the effectiveness of ad campaigns…
  • Activate and interact — Finally, this data, combined with the right systems and infrastructure must be able to deliver personalized and interactive ads to the right consumer, at the right time.”

Consumers/subscribers should decide whether such an advanced system can target them at all.  Beyond informed consent (and data security), there need to be clear safeguards.  Targeted ads for financial, health, and products aimed to children and adolescents raise consumer protection issues.  I have real concerns about “ethnic” profiling, given how lucrative advertisers realize the Hispanic and African American markets are.  We believe that the cable industry has to engage the public in a serious debate about the scope and goal of its Project Canoe and advanced advertising initiative.  Congress, the FCC, and the FTC must become more proactive to protect our privacy from this new approach.

PS:  This week’s Multichannel News offers insight into the latest developments.  Here’s an excerpt:  “This year, the largest cable operators in the U.S. plan to have upgraded at least 20 million digital set-tops with code to run standardized interactive-TV applications. That will make it possible for viewers to click a button on their remote to, say, ask an advertiser to e-mail them more information…The industry over the last two years has coalesced around a common technical standard, maintained by CableLabs, referred to as Enhanced Binary Interchange Format, or EBIF (pronounced “EE-biff”)…Comcast, for one, claimed it had deployed EBIF user agents on more than 10 million Motorola set-top boxes by the start of 2009. The operator hopes to complete the rollout to its entire Motorola footprint, about 20 million boxes, by midyear…” [Interactive TV Begins to Bloom.  Todd Spangler.  Multichannel News.  March 3, 2009].

Center for Democracy & Technology Goes for the “Gold” as it Raises $ for its “Gala” from AT&T, eBay, Microsoft, Google (and many other corporations)

CDT is having a “Gala Celebration” next month, supported by “Gold, Silver, and Bronze” sponsors.  AT&T, eBay, Microsoft and Google are listed at the $15,000 “Gold” level [“Two tables in Premium Location-Two tickets to the VIP Reception”]; Among the “Silver” sponsors [“One table-One ticket to the VIP Reception”] at the $7,500 tab include Time Warner (AOL), Dow Lohnes, Qorvis Communications (repping Sun, Cisco, etc), American Express, Verizon, Intel, US Chamber of Commerce, ID Analytics, Yahoo!, Arnold & Porter, IAC/Interactive Corp, Thompson LexisNexis, Hogan & Hartson (reps News Corp’s MySpace, among others), Comcast, and Sonnenschein Nath  & Rosenthal, LLP.   There are also a number of “Bronze” sponsor at the $1000 level [“One seat at a table”]. (CDT has a Facebook page on the event.)

CDT’s 2007 Gala, which honored Bill Gates, had “more than 900″ supporters” in attendance.

Progress & Freedom Foundation & Online Privacy: Looking at PFF’s Online Ad Industry [& Data Collecting] Funders

Two staffers from the Progress and Freedom Foundation (Adam Thierer and Berin Szoka) issued a quick response to the new FTC online marketing privacy principles.  In a press release announcing the short paper, PFF explains that:

Tighter regulation of the online advertising market in the form of privacy mandates, the authors warn, “would severely curtail the overall quantity of content and services offered—and greatly limit the ability of new providers to enter the market with innovative offerings.”

It’s interesting to consider what such “tighter regulation” of the online marketing might mean for the companies that fund the Progress and Freedom Foundation.  The list includes heavyweights of online data collection, such as Google, Microsoft, News Corp (MySpace and other Fox Interactive properties) and Time Warner.  PFF funders include monopoly ISPs which want to get into interactive data collection and online ad targeting big-time, such as Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon (other PFF supporters include a number of companies engaged in online ad targeting, such as Cox, CBS, NBC, etc).

Perhaps a good research project for PFF would be to examine the online data collection, analysis, and ad targeting work being done by its funders (including all the technologies being used).  We’d like to see the press release on that one!

Project Canoe: Data-mining and Viewer Monitoring for Ad Targeting—-for banks, dog food, and your Cable Company

The cable TV industry’s interactive advertising consortium called Project Canoe is steadily moving ahead with plans that will harness more cable viewer data for profiling and targeting. Here’s some excerpts from a Hewlett-Packard blog:

“…Canoe’s first national go-to-market product is called Creative Versioning Platform which marries the cable industry’s ad zones with demographic databases, and this will offer national advertisers more targeted, relevant and effective advertising with commercials that run simultaneously across the national market with different messages and tags…

So who might this impact… How about consumer banking? Although there is a major consolidation in recent weeks with consumer banks, they still have specific audiences they are trying to target with their diverse banking products. Imagine Bank of America’s Private Wealth Management group only targeting household income over $150k with one specific message and another message for free checking account for households less than $75k. Or how about Purina dog food for only dog owners? Did you know that 40% of all U.S. TV households own a dog? The opportunities are endless.

Data – will be a major emphasis in Canoe’s charter…In the very near future, Canoe will have the ability to measure and monitor viewing via their set top boxes, second by second data by each box. Look familiar? That’s right, the Internet! These boxes will have in-dept and granular data for programmers and advertisers alike…Request for Information (RFI) – another basic feature with high potential…Pretty powerful stuff – high level of tracking…

T-Commerce…What could be better – you buy it during your favorite show, have it billed to your cable bill, have it shipped to your house (as the cable co. has your address) and you pay for it at the end of the month.

So who might this impact….How about credit card companies to begin with! And if the cable company offered to finance the purchases, they could create their own finance companies – similar to auto dealers. That’s called “extra income.”

source: The Changing Face of Media. Oct 6, 2008.

Network Advertising Initiative Continues to Protect Online Marketers Interests Instead of Consumer Privacy

The Network Advertising Initiative’s (NAI) real role is to protect the ability of its members (Google, Yahoo!, AOL, etc.) to collect huge amounts of profiling and targeting data from each of us. NAI claims it’s promoting self-regulation on data privacy through its principles and guidelines. But NAI has long been a toothless group, and is basically a public relations vehicle helping to cover the data crime and more-than-misdemeanors of the industry.

So it’s not surprising that last week, the NAI announced that while it supported an “opt-in” for the kind of behavioral targeting planned by the phone and cable companies, it didn’t believe such a safeguard was required for its data-collected membership. In a statement, NAI Executive Director Trevor Hughes said that his group “believes that opt-out continues to be an appropriate choice mechanism for traditional web-based behavioral advertising and this is part of our sliding scale framework.” That’s the political position taken, of course, by his members. They are the biggest behavioral targeters on the planet.

The NAI is a weak group which reflects the cynical view of the online ad industry.  NAI members hope that they can fool policymakers into believing consumer privacy can be safeguarded by the data wolves running the privacy hen house. The battle lines for the next Congress, the FTC and FCC are being drawn. Opt-out is a feckless approach to digital ad privacy. Responsible companies should be in the lead calling for meaningful opt-in. Note to NAI members:  Deregulation and industry self-governance–how shall I put it–doesn’t seem to have worked that well so far!