Electronic trading – how will trading systems handle convergence?

With Video on Demand (VoD) growing, the first panel at MediaTel’s ‘Electronic Trading Debate’ (11 October) discussed convergence between traditional television advertising and online and what impact this had on current trading systems.

Sky’s AdSmart is a service that allows the tailoring of advertising when watching programmes with Sky Go, based on the additional information provided to the broadcaster. This information builds up a picture of what types of products and services might be of interest and then the system substitutes standard advertisements with tailored ones.

AdSmart for set-top boxes is due out in July or August 2013. Jeff Eales, director of systems and development at BSkyB said, “we are moving forward very carefully as the project means TV and online will collide. The set-top box will be a mini-server and ads will be targeted to individual households”.

Very specific ads in specific ad breaks will be overlaid on the existing network break to target certain households. Eales said, “it is how you administer it, that is the question. The ads will go on CARIA”.

Additionally the industry will need to agree measurement criteria as AdSmart will be impression based compared to the TV ratings compiled by the BARB survey.

The future opportunity is for Sky to deliver hyper-local messages such as local plumbing services.

However, VoD was still labour intensive. Currently around half a dozen people are involved in every VoD ad. Broadcast employees dealing with VoD are under stress from day to day management with huge data sets administered.

Steve Bottomley, business services director at News International said “The cost of content is very high and traditional media need to change their business models. Migration to digital is a strain moving from one model to another and ensuring that commoditisation is limited”.