It has been widely publicized this week that Canoe, the venture that was supposed to bring US cable operators zone addressable advertising, has had the plug pulled on its first attempt. The company Canoe Ventures has been quoted talking about using 20th century technology on a 21st century problem.
Canoe was a joint venture between the US’s six largest cable operators, and was working on something called CAM, to allow advertisers to pick the geographies in which to run adverts.
A second technological approach will now begin, with no time frame on when it might come to market, but Canoe is not closing its doors.
Part of the problem was sticking to arcane scheduling requirements for local cable and the fact that not all cable operators use the same ad-insertion technology. The upshot was that too long a notice was required to pick ads in the markets that a particular campaign would run in, and agencies would have gained too little benefit.
As the world moves to DVR technology and DOCSIS, there is no reason why a fare more sophisticated IPTV style system, using IP packets to deliver ads to storage ahead of time, and splicing them in on the fly, couldn’t be envisaged.
Canoe will also start work on interactive TV, also likely to be aimed at advertising for the most part, due out later this year, based on an existing CableLabs specification for ordering more information about products seen in adverts.
In Faultline’s view advertising goes up dramatically in value when it can be addressed by either location, which content is being viewed or home demographics ‘ a system using all three is still a pipedream, even for IPTV, but cable currently lags considerably due to its non-IP architecture. After Canoe’s first failure it lags even further.