know | Future

Tivo today has announced today the release of Product Watch. This new capability will allow users to select favorite categories or brands and TiVo will deliver ads that match the criteria to their main menu. The service has been designed with the participation of many advertising entities including IPG, OMD The Richards Group as well as Comcast Spotlight, the advertising sales division of the cable operator (I guess this means that the partnership between them and Tivo is bearing fruit).

General Motors, Sony Pictures, Lending Tree and Kraft Foods are the premium advertisers for their respective categories and will be producing custom content targeted at the Tivo service, presumably longer format video. Though there is no mention of other capabilities, it is safe to assume that this product will make use of existing Tivo capablilities to allow user interaction such as brochure requests etc.

This is really a testing ground for the viability of advertising on demand, where the consumer opts in to receive targeted ads.

Though there are clear areas where consumers that are on the market for a large ticket item such as a car would be likely to opt in to advertising, whether they are willing to do it for other products may be a harder sell. This is where ad agencies need to make content so compelling that the lines between entertainment and marketing message completely disappear. Think back on the BMW films of a few years past, this is the perfect content to distribute via Product Watch considering current poor penetration of broadband in the US. Imagine the viewership that campaign would have received if users had been able to receive them on their Tivo with no downloading (Tivo delivers content by setting DVRs to record off cable channel air time they buy, clever eh?). And it does not have to be cars, good content could be built around almost any consumer product with a little imagination.

Another advantage that Tivo has over broadband delivered content, specially downloadable content, is the wealth of statistics that they can produce on the viewing patterns of consumers of that content, allowing the advertisers to establish the eficacy of their content at an incredible level of detail by tracking not only every viewing, but every pause and rewind the viewrs make. The data provided by Tivo currently is in aggregate only by policy, but they provide granularity down to the zip code and once their software starts showing up in cable DVR boxes, who knows, Comcast may not be as careful about safeguarding subscriber’s privacy.