Targeted Advertising Coming To Cable TV

The New York Times reports that Cablevision Systems is testing a new project in Brooklyn, the Bronx, and some areas of New Jersey to bring targeted advertising to television audiences. "The technology requires no hardware or installation in a subscriber's home, so viewers may not realize they are seeing ads different from a neighbor's. But during the same show, a 50-something male may see an ad for, say, high-end speakers from Best Buy, while his neighbors with children may see one for a Best Buy video game." The test deployment includes 500,000 households, and separates viewers by demographic data from Experian. "Experian has data on individuals that it collects through public records, registries and other sources. It matches the name and address of the subscriber to what it knows about them, and assigns demographic characteristics to households. (The match is a blind one: advertisers do not know what name and address they are advertising to, Cablevision executives said.)"

Comments

Not sure of the value of this.

[Telecommando]

I'm wondering, if Grandma wants to buy a new video game for little Bobby, how is she going to know about any sales in her area? All she's going to get on her TV is commercials for arthritis rub, denture cream, cat food and the like.

On a related subject, I've also wondered why they target ads to kids anyway. They can't drive, don't have much money and from my experience if I whined and pleaded with my dad to buy me something I saw on TV I generally got sent to my room.

Re:Not sure of the value of this.

[Kabuthunk]

Sadly, a lot of parents cave into their child's slightest whims every single time. I've seen brats in the mall that I would have loved to hit with my car for the way they were acting, and the mother is actually APPOLOGIZING to the brat for not buying him the crap sooner.

It would be the children of THOSE parents (although it applies to situations not quite that extreme as well, I suppose) that all the advertisements you're thinking of are for.

Re:Not sure of the value of this.

[David Nabbit]

On a related subject, I've also wondered why they target ads to kids anyway. They can't drive, don't have much money and from my experience if I whined and pleaded with my dad to buy me something I saw on TV I generally got sent to my room.

Are you kidding? Child marketing is a huge industry. Coincidentally, I'm pretty sure Dante reserved one of the lower circles of Hell for child marketers.

Took them long enough

[Anonymous Coward]

They should do this with television so I'm not paying for 3 fucking sports channels, Cartoon Network, 2 Disney channels, 2 VH1s, 2 MTVs, TLC, and the Weather Channel.

Shooting the fish in the bucket!

[Anonymous Coward]

Today, our advertising is so full of lies and deceptions, only if they would tell the truth, then the consumer would be able to choose what they need and not what the advertiser wants the to want and buy.

Our brains can not tell the difference between fact and fiction. It's our higher cognitive abilities that will reason in hope to find the fact. Advertisements don't give the higher functions a chance to work, subsequently and despite the common knowledge that the ads are just ads, in the long term, we end up thinking what they want us to think.

Test your self, next time you are in the grocery store, review what you pick and ask yourself why one brand vs the other, then compare ingredients, and see if you have made the better choice. I have talked to many and found that they just picked things that they though were good. I urge you to read the following articles on false memories and see how easy it is to manipulate ones thoughts even memories:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/06/010612065657.htm

http://www.rense.com/general11/TAWT.HTM

We have no Cable programing of any kind in our home, our time is ours. We rent movies, talk about thing in life, inter act with our neighbors and read more. It took a year after we cut the cable to realize that we never really benefited from watching general TV programing. Just wasting time, the time that was supposed to compose our lives, hence wasting our lives.

Good luck.

Re:Shooting the fish in the bucket!

[Anonymous Coward]

I know Slashdot absolutely loves being spoonfed bullshit about how "The Man" is trying to control them, and noone will ever see this anyway, but I'm going to go ahead and say something about this.

Human beings are influenced by their surroundings. Everything we see, hear, and experiences shapes our thoughts and feelings.

Naturally, we're also influenced by the thoughts of our fellow human beings. We didn't become successful as a species in spite of this, it's the reason we function the way we do. We learn and grow by absorbing the world around us and sorting it all out. Understandably, these influences can be for better or for worse. The information age has made this far more obvious and important than ever before.

However, this bit of information seems to horrify some people. They react to it with some variant of "The advertisers are trying to control your mind!" This is true to an extent, as the media pushes at us from all directions with messages such as "Your children are not safe" and "You really do need that fancy new Lexus," as it would be beneficial to them, for one reason or another, that we believe them.

This raises an important question. At which point do outside influences stop being the way we grow and learn and start being mind control? Hanging out with the guy who sold crack under the bleachers in High School certainly influenced you, but was he trying to control your mind? Likewise, is a Lysol commercial really all that bad? The medium of transmission doesn't seem to make much difference here, and neither does the message.

In the end, what matters is our ability to filter information. You really CAN choose which influences you will allow to affect you and the ones that you will ignore. Yet this doesn't appear to be common knowledge.

Perhaps it's the fallacy of "Everyone else is just a mass of sheeple, I'm the only one who thinks for herself!" or it could simply be that we are virgins to this new, information driven world and we simply need more time to adapt.

Re:Shooting the fish in the bucket!

[toddestan]

I see a lot of automobile ads. Do they influence me? Yes, to the extent that seeing the vehicle on TV might get me into a dealership to have a look at it, but is my final decision made by TV? Not a chance - I need to evaluate the test drive, the deal, the warranty, operating costs, and, these days, whether the company is likely to survive or not. Ads have zero influence there.

The fact that they got you to go to the dealership to "have a look" means the ad worked on you. Remember, one of the goals of advertising to convice the consumer to buy something while maintaining the illusion that they choose to buy it of their own free will the entire time. Don't be so naive ao to assume that you are immune to it.

Re:OK fine.

[dgatwood]

Except you won't. Experian won't have details about credit card transactions. They'll see "Oh, he buys a lot of stuff at Fry's, so lets send him electronics ads." What they won't realize is that most of those purchases involve either DVDs or capacitors for microphone modding... the occasional hard drive.... For anything more expensive, I'm 100x more likely to buy online, usually at about half the price.

I'm also likely to spend days or weeks researching purchases ahead of time to zero in on a particular model, so sales on a different model are unlikely to affect my decisions at all on most products.

They'll see that I buy a lot of food at restaurants, so they'll send me restaurant ads. What they won't see is that it is invariably restaurants within walking distance of my workplace and that I almost never go to restaurants that aren't, which pretty much means five or six very specific restaurants.

They'll see that I go to Target a lot, so they'll send me Target ads. What they won't see is that I go there to either eat at the Pizza Hut Pan Pizza Express inside (which looks like any other target purchase) or to buy groceries and carry them back to my workplace refrigerator. Once every couple of months, I'll restock on soap, shampoo, toilet paper, paper towels... but otherwise, it's pretty rare that I go to one looking for more general purchases.

It's just like TiVo's suggestion feature where it sees that I watch a couple of shows that are (IMHO incorrectly) marked as "Kids", and it starts suggesting Barney & Friends. It sees that I watch a couple of shows that are marked "Drama" and "Movie", and it starts picking up black-and-white drama movies from the 1940s.

Any system like this, if you want it to work well, needs to have dozens of very specific keywords associated with each ad, and needs to have a thumbs-up/thumbs-down feature. It should also allow you to give a thumbs up or down to keywords on a manual basis to adjust the rankings.

Ideally, they should also do surveys regularly to randomly chosen people and ask them why they gave a thumbs down to a commercial that looked like something they might have reasonably been interested in. That would give additional insight into the sorts of keyword information they should be adding, and would help the system improve.

Short of that, it is inevitably going to be a joke.

For those of you who have seen The Network

[Foobar of Borg]

It's too late, Diana! There's nothing left in you that I can live with! You're one of Howard's humanoids, and, if I stay with you, I'll be destroyed! Like Howard Beale was destroyed. Like Laureen Hobbs was destroyed. Like everything you and the institution of television touch is destroyed. You are television incarnate, Diana, indifferent to suffering, insensitive to joy. All of life is reduced to the common rubble of banality. War, murder, death are all the same to you as bottles of beer. The daily business of life is a corrupt comedy. You even shatter the sensations of time and space into split-seconds and instant replays. You are madness, Diana, virulent madness, and everything you touch dies with you. Well, not me. Not while I can still feel pleasure and pain and love.

Basically, forget television. It is an expensive waste of time. Go out and have fun. Take your daughter out to the park. Get out and enjo a nice sunny day, like we had today where I live. The hell with television. Its time has passed.