Israeli and UK based conditional access specialist NDS will use the IBC broadcasting show in Amsterdam this week to launch an attack on the advertising market. It will introduce NDS Dynamic to facilitate audience measurement, targeted advertising and interactive advertising.
We have always said the companies like Nielsen Media were vulnerable to purely technical methods for viewing analysis, which rest on collecting channel change data from a set top and transferring a brief summary to a collation point. However NDS has not given out much data on how the system works so we will try to get some confirmation that this is its approach at IBC next week.
The NDS aim is to offer a single integrated system to identify target audiences, engage with them through interactive advertising and instantly measure the impact of the campaigns. NDS said that with Dynamic advertisers will be able to create campaigns that deliver broadcast and interactive ads targeted to specific audience profiles with rich set-top measurement data to support decision-making.
The Targeted Advertising module is designed to replaces broadcast ads with targeted advertisements according to household or audience profiles, location and other factors. We figure the ads are delivered using push VoD and can include both video and graphic overlay banners. This smells of the intellectual property that TiVo has licensed to a number of News Corp subsidiaries, because TiVo was messing around with this kind of capability about two years ago and we are sure has patented much of it.
NDS will also build a platform for interaction including telescopic ads which link to longer format content. This is definitely broadcast to a DVR and replayed after a trigger advert has piqued a viewers interest or directly from the EPG. This is most definitely a TiVo invention, and it promised to work on this capability with both Comcast and DirecTV in the US. There will also be dedicated advertiser location ads that allow access to a product mini site; and request for information ads that allow viewers to contact advertisers directly. All of these can be made to work with a limited return path, such as a telephone line plugged into the DVR, but certainly with a broadband line.
The audience measurement system has come about through a tie up between NDS and TNS Media Research which provides internet, TV, and radio audience measurement in over 30 countries, and which is a direct rival to Nielsen.