TV On-Demand May Make Ads More Targeted

[SOURCE: Wall Street Journal, AUTHOR: Brian Steinberg brian.steinberg@wsj.com]
Should network TV video-on-demand deals make ad people furious? Advertising executives seemed unruffled by the news. They themselves recognize the same set of forces driving CBS and NBC: Technology is giving rise to a multitude of new ways to target consumers with entertainment and with commercial messages. Advertising was once a simple mass-market media buy; now it is a dialogue between a seller of soup, sneakers or cellphones and a particular media outlet's narrow audience. That media outlet is just as likely to be a computer screen or a mobile device as a television set, media buyers say. As a result, advertisers are starting to treat TV more and more as just one conversation among many. Companies are spending more money than ever on media to reach their customers, and advertising agencies are helping them find new ways to do it. The difference is that the slices of the pie are getting thinner -- especially television's slice. During the first six months of 2005, 38% of advertisers' media spending went to cable, local and network TV, down 13 percentage points from 2000. The financial model for ads in on-demand programming hasn't yet emerged as advertisers look for an acceptable measurement of consumer response and figure out whether they should negotiate with the TV network, the on-demand distributor -- or both.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB113149442328791674.html?mod=todays_us_marketplace
(requires subscription)

* How to Watch TV
[SOURCE: Wall Street Journal, AUTHOR: Peter Grant peter.grant@wsj.com & Dionne Searcey dionne.searcey@wsj.com]
A guide on video-on-demand, DVRs, TV by cellphone, iPods and video over the Internet.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB113150218439791869.html?mod=todays_us_personal_journal
(requires subscription)