By Alan Coleman on 9 Jan 2014
Sometimes I like to burst out of my digital marketing bubble, stick my head above the trenches and take a look at the scary world of offline advertising. Until recently, every time I did this my heart would sink a little bit at the lack of innovation within these traditional channels. However, I recently found out about BSkyB’s newly launched Adsmart service. Have you heard about it? If not, you might want to sit down for this.
Introducing Smarter TV Advertising
Adsmart is a form of TV advertising that uses a customer's existing Sky HD box to dynamically serve and broadcast TV ads. Households are selected based on factors like age, location, life-stage, income etc. Sky’s official explanation of how these targets are formed is that it is based on ‘own customer data’ and ‘information from consumer profile experts’. However, it’s hard to imagine that Sky aren’t collecting loads of great data from how customers are using their sky box; which programmes they record, time of use, frequency of use etc. Just for fun, take a look at the saved content on your own DVR and see how easy it be to figure out your household demographic. My DVR contains Chuggington, Postman Pat, Match of the Day, Borgen, Modern Family and load of other things that I never want anyone to find out about, but you can see how it wouldn’t be that difficult to 
take a stab at the profile of my household. With Adsmart, viewers watching exactly the same programme at the same time could be served with completely different ads. Sky offer several different targeting figures, but a good example of how this might work comes from their Optimised Linear option. The example they give is a car manufacturer that could have a linear campaign for a saloon but advertise SUV’s to families and superminis to affluent young singles in that same linear spot. Imagine a world where people without any kids never have to watch another Pampers ad.
The Future of TV Advertising: Will It Need A Great Digital Marketer’s Skillset?
Does any of this sound familiar? Well if you’re a digital marketer like me, it should. Targeted audiences and segmentation of this nature is what makes digital marketing great. I can see innovations like Adsmart becoming the norm for TV advertising with the targeting methods becoming even more sophisticated as the product evolves. It won’t be long before a/b split testing TV messages and audiences becomes the norm and measurement of results will just be part of the process. I’m going to put it out there and suggest that before long, the skills that it takes to make a great digital marketer could be skills that make an outstanding TV advertiser. I’d love the chance to optimise a TV campaign! Brendan
