Sky launching AdSmart in summer 2013

Jamie West, director of AdSmart & commercial development at BSkyB and David Whittaker, Director of Business Development and Advertising Technologies, NDS, demonstrated the new Sky AdSmart software yesterday at the Future of TV Advertising conference in London.

AdSmart will effectively turn all Sky boxes into ad servers, allowing targetted advertising to be delivered to linear, VOD and catch-up programming on any Sky wholly-owned channels on the Sky platform.

Launching in the summer, after a full “test and learn” phase, it will be operating within seven million households from nine million set-top boxes, with the set-top box making advertising decisions based on the information that Sky holds on the household.

From launch there will be around 200 advertising creatives stored on the Sky set-top box at any one time.

Initially first in break will remain untouched, but after that first spot, a targetted advert can be served to the Sky subscriber, overlaying any advert that is deemed not as suitable to the household with an AdSmart creative.

The demonstration at the conference showed a mocked up Sinbad ad break, with four different households’ TV sets showing what would be aired into the lounge. First break was all the same, but on the second break different creatives were beamed to each different box, based on a combination of anything up to 90 targetted attributes.

Attributes include region, city, age, lifestage, financial outlook and Experian Mosaic lifestyle.

All data from the AdSmart initiative will be measured by SkyIQ as well as an independent analyst. In addition, BARB panel households’ set-top-boxes will also pick up the specific creative that has played out.

Advertisers will only have to pay for what has been aired, for example if the client was Pampers and that creative was replaced in 2% of households, Pampers would only be paying for 98% rather than the full 100%, with AdSmart advertisers paying for that additional 2%.