The Internet comes to TV: Project Canvas – a non-entity to advertisers

Project Canvas faced mixed opinion at MediaTel Group’s ‘The Internet comes to TV’ event in London on Wednesday, held in association with Rovi, but much of this was simply down to it still being seen as work in progress.

“Advertisers are very detached from [Canvas] … they can’t take it all in,” Bob Wootton, director of media and advertising affairs at ISBA, said.  “It is utterly justified confusion.  Advertisers are being told everything is the new best thing.”

From an advertisers point of view, Wootton says “show us a consumer proposition and we’ll take a look, otherwise we’ll just continue to keep tabs”.

Simon Daglish, Fox Interactive’s VP and commercial director, agreed with Wootton’s “jumbled spaghetti” comment.  “Over-engineering is human nature.  I am sure we’ll get it right eventually but at the moment it’s too complicated,” he said.

For Rhys McLachlan, head of broadcast implementation at Mediacom, Project Canvas is currently a non-entity, and “doesn’t exist to my clients”.

Further, whilst McLachlan believes that Canvas offers commercial and monetisation opportunities “to programming that would otherwise just be archived”, his clients require audience validation, so, Canvas won’t be accepted by advertisers until there are metrics to support the service’s uptake.

Of course, UKOM plans to publish video data at the end of this year, “but it’s still a long way from where we want it to be”, Bruce Daisley, head of AdSales at YouTube commented.

According to Daisley, the holy grail would be to link TV and VoD data, however, he said UKOM is at least a “step in the right direction”.