Despite a disastrous period for Dish networks in the US, the company continues to explore new and exciting territories, which unfortunately it so rarely sees through into a revenue opportunity. This time it is that Holy Grail of addressable advertising.
Satellite has a fantastic national footprint advantage, but for VoD, triple play, and now the idea of more relevant advertising, it suffers from not having a broadband return path and has to re-invent the concepts.
Dish is now working with Invidi Technologies using its Advatar technology to deliver addressable, targeted national and local television advertising, the company says.
Dish further says that already many of its more advanced receivers have support for splicing in new adverts on the fly for broadcast television, presumably by issuing lots of broadcast advertising streams, and storing them in a DVR like push VoD and then selecting the right ones from viewer profiles. Now by partnering Invidi it can harness that capability and sell advertising against specific households using geographic and demographic separations.
“Dish Network is focused on delivering relevant and measurable ads to the advertising community and continually looks for technological innovation that will deliver advertisers the best possible value,” said Michael Kelly, executive vice president for Dish Network.
It is no surprise that last December 2007, GroupM, a WPP company with huge advertising clout, invested in Invidi Technologies, so if Dish sees this initiative through it is certain to have a big sales drive on the cards in advertising, though it may never make up for the shortfall it is seeing in subscriptions (see elsewhere this issues).