Cable Industry Canoe Interactive Ad Venture Sinks Four Years and $200 Million Later... Charter, Cox, Time Warner Cable, Cablevision, Comcast and Bright House Networks have collaboratively been working on an advertising system dubbed "canoe" since 2008. The project was initially aimed at delivering different ads to different households depending on demographic data -- a data collection effort that even involved Comcast building a 500 terabyte data warehouse designed to store data on your viewing habits. However, the dream never materialized. In 2010, the then-head of the Canoe venture scrapped the initial project, complaining that they were "trying to use 20th-century technology to enable a 21st-century advanced-advertising product." The effort then continued to bleed key executives without much of a product to show for their effort. This week Multichannel News notes that Canoe Ventures is shutting down interactive TV advertising operations -- closing its New York office and laying off 120 employees, including their CEO: Canoe Ventures is shutting down interactive TV advertising operations -- closing its New York office and laying off 120 employees, including CEO Kathy Timko -- leaving about 30 employees to focus on VOD ads as its sole product, the company confirmed. The decision to abandon ITV ads and dramatically pare back Canoe's mission came after a review by its cable operator owners, according to a Canoe spokeswoman. "It's the result of what the marketplace told us," she said. While Multichannel News and Canoe blames the failure on marketplace demand and Madison Avenue, history has shown the cable industry also isn't always particularly good at working collaboratively on a useful product (their wireless effort known as Pivot being example B). While a national cross-carrier interactive ad platform didn't float, many cable operators have managed to make significant strides with numerous ad innovations on their own networks.
|
 Reviews:
 ·ooma
 ·Optimum Online
 ·Verizon FiOS
| in transition.. (to cord cutting). the cable tv industry is run by a bunch of people, who.. much like the RIAA have stuck their heads in the sand for far too long and out pops internet 2.0's evolving bittorrent (or I like to call it, napster for video).
these guys are lucky they OWN half the last mile ISP pipes, otherwise they'd have their hats handed to them in another 10 years. an increasingly younger generation are bypassing commercials altogether by being part of the video file generation who downloads content at their liesure, not the cable company's take it or leave it subscription service. | |
|  | | | Re: in transition.. (to cord cutting). So in other words, piracy is now easy and convenient, with little to no effective enforcement.
Sounds like a solvable problem. | |
|
 IowaCowboyWant to go back to IowaPremium
join:2010-10-16
Springfield, MA
·Comcast
 ·Verizon Broadban..
| At least my TiVo Boxes are one-way devices At least my TiVo boxes can receive signals from Comcast, but cannot talk back to Comcast on the return path. What I view is my business and not Comcast's. The fact that the TiVo boxes are one way would render the Canoe concept useless.
--
All of my CPE (including my EMTA) is customer owned. The only Comcast owned equipment in my house is the CableCards in the two TiVO boxes I own. | |
| |  tshirtPremium,MVM
join:2004-07-11
Snohomish, WA
kudos:3 | Re: At least my TiVo Boxes are one-way devices Umm, you have cable cards, which means they know (if the want ed to) what you tuned and they know where you live which covers the 2 biggest demographics, pretty much what canoe was supposed to keep track of. | |
| | | fiberguyMy views are my own.Premium
join:2005-05-20
kudos:3 | Re: At least my TiVo Boxes are one-way devices hrmmmmm | |
| | | | | said by tshirt:Umm, you have cable cards, which means they know (if the want ed to) what you tuned and they know where you live which covers the 2 biggest demographics, pretty much what canoe was supposed to keep track of.
No they don't. CableCARDs and TiVos are one way devices (on the cable side). | |
|
| | "21st-century advanced-advertising" ...like DPI? I thought spying on folks was a "time-honored" tradition. | |
| DesdinovaPremium
join:2003-01-26
Gaithersburg, MD | Hmmm... With harddrives being as pricey as they are right now, they could probably sell the data warehouse and make most of their money back.  | |
| | | Why Canoe Ventures failed »sites.google.com/site/cuoirent/n···tvmarket
Behavioral Based Social Media System for the Cable TV Market
posted May 19, 2011 8:09 AM by Herb Lair
Cable has long history of failing to develop 1-1 target marketing. Canoe Ventures (latest MSO venture) was touted as the Holy Grail of targeted advertising and is reportedly less than a success at this stage.
»tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/01/03/···uestion/
Excerpt from above link on January, 2011 Fortune.com –
“Advertisers will spend $56 billion putting ads on TV this year,...The cable industry thought it would be a big opportunity too, but its efforts have fallen short. Canoe Ventures, a two-year-old project of the six biggest operators, has launched just one notable product…”
»www.businessinsider.com/jason-ki···v-2011-2
Excerpt from above link on February, 2011 Business Insider
Identifies advertising market being missed by Cable TV operators
“Advertisers have weighed in heavily on the future of TV, with both their thoughts and their considerable wallets. Advertisers are increasingly expecting to present their advertising messages to just their desired audience…and not to anyone else. For over 60 years, video advertising could only be bought via a TV show’s projected audience, which served as a blunt proxy for a certain target audience. The result has been many wasted impressions and an often irrelevant experience for consumers. In the near future, advertisers will demand the ability to target their messages to people rather than targeting their messages to TV shows as proxies for people.”
The obvious alternative, with the least cost to implement is an independent Cloud CRM solution designed to cross index cable subscriber households with their corresponding social network interests. The current regulatory and privacy issues experienced by cable TV operators gathering unauthorized data from set-top boxes could be minimized, by validating subscriber and even eliminated by essentially having an opt-in plan (provided conveniently by the social media). Access along with profile and interests of households would be controlled by the subscriber’s social media platform of choice. Facebook has high consumer acceptance and could be used for household profiles, product interests, social interests, and viewing entertainment interests. There would be incentives to the subscribers to opt-in including notification and reminder of viewing favorites, Groupon type ads, and specific ads matching interests with infomercial type group discounts and urgency to buy.
The current design of target marketing advertising ventures is fundamentally flawed. They focus on demographics, and fail to identify the individual behavioral current and future household interests.
I would propose using a data cross indexing similar to a data warehouse project I was involved with at iN Demand. »www.indemand.com/ .
Project would involve developing a bidirectional Cloud interface program using a CRM application between the social media and MSO subscriber records and communicating behavioral marketing - business advertising, discounts, specific videos/groups, family albums – providing subscriber awareness of TV programming -- movies, products, etc. similar to Amazon and Groupon. This would make subscriber stickier and substantially reduce turnover.
To paraphrase a comment I made in the CED 1999 publication about the Internet, cable TV operators need to become the new best friends with the 600 million members of social media.
| |
|
| |
|
|
