Technologist Patrick Christian was wandering around IBC two years ago, looking lost, with no stand and nothing very much like a company. He was a programmer at heart, talking about a Linux based server for demographic and content based IPTV advertising, and although ahead of his time we wondered how he would fare in the harsh business world.
At this year’s IBC we talked instead to Barry Llewellyn, the VP of sales and marketing at Packet Vision, the company that Christian founded on the back of his idea, which after absorbing $12 million of venture funding is finally starting to look the part of the company that Christian had in mind. The biggest surprise is that the company’s existence has not yet triggered a bunch of copycats.
Once addressable advertising becomes in demand the company will need a lot of friends, but with the ex-CEO of agency Zenith Optimedia, and involvement from one of the Alchemy Partners founders John Morton, on the board, it probably is beginning to have the right type of friends.
The system has moved on since the early days when it was assumed it would be a Linux appliance in the operator’s network and the business model would be selling boxes.
Llewellyn explained, ‘We now offer a hosted system where we run the service and talk to the operator about taking a percentage of the incremental increases in the operator’s revenues.
‘We now have 4 ways to extract information about the customer, the first is to take the data from the operator about a customer’s remote control selections. If we know what programs he or she has watched in the past, and we also know what they are watching now, it is fairly easy to know what advertising they are interested in.
‘The second data source is in the subscription database that the telco has, which can be handed over to the demographic system without any of the identity data, There are also public databases,’ and he gave the example of credit databases like Experian. ‘Finally we buy in data from audience measurement companies such as Nielsen,’ said Llewellyn.
For our own money we believe that the best source of data for deciding which adverts would be effective on a TV screen, Packet Vision should be asking the viewer themselves. ‘We will also try to co-opt the operator into using questionnaires where viewers select the type of advertising that interests them,’ Llewellyn conceded.
All that information has to be shared with the channel owner, who has to get some of the revenue, but also with the telco, and the resulting feedback needs to be sent to the advertiser with data about which adverts have been served, for what reason, and when. It is this final data, a little like the internet insertion data that a system like Doubleclick gives to internet advertisers, which proves that the advertising is reaching a smaller numbers of highly interested parties, and which increases the value of each ad delivered.
‘The idea is to integrate it into the existing broadcasters’ sales and traffic systems, and our next step is to go through trials and tests,’ said Llewellyn.
Tests include a deal at UK operation Inuk networks, and Packet Vision is in discussions about trials at Telefonica Spain and at other operators both Italy and Hong Kong.