Addressable TV Advertising, a long-sought dream of television marketers, is about to become reality.

AdAge is reporting that Canoe, the [poorly-named] technology consortium backed by the six largest cable media companies in the US, will launch the television industry’s first national addressable advertising system next month.

What is Addressable TV advertising and why should it concern us?

Direct Marketers have long been able to slice and dice the country (any country) into different segments, typically based on income and whatever other data is gathered and analysed by census-takers and other researchers. Want to mail to higher-income households in a specified geographic area? No problem. But up until now it hasn’t been feasible to apply that same segmentation and targeting to television.

Even though the cable television operators have always known where you live — and could have matched that address against commercially available databases to deliver unique content just to your household (and to other households that have a demographically similar profile) — they haven’t offered that service in the past. The effort involved, and the technology cost, to offer micro-targeting to advertisers who only had the one national commercial anyway, meant the exercise simply wasn’t worthwhile.

Now, however, as video migrates to the web, it’s never been more important to offer bespoke targeting — especially when competing with organisations that offer geographic, contextual & behavioral targeting and even personalised targeting on sites where registration is required. As marketers get more adept at micro-targeting it’s inevitable that they’ll demand similar capabilities from the previously mass media.

One size, it turns out, no longer fits all.

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