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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.)"
A little weird, but I'm not really alarmed that this is being used. It (for better or worse) is public data - Taking advantage of it to bore me as little as possible with ads seems perfectly appropriate. Frankly, if I have to watch ads, I'd rather see ads for computer equipment and stuff than for My Little Pony Playhouse...
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Married a chick from Eastern Europe, who is .. cough, 19 years younger than myself. Will we get Viagra or Britney Spears Perfume advertising?
Oh, the suspense!
Cool... No more tampon commercials at my house...
They might have a tough time finding product placement for this household, since the account's in my grandfather's name, and he died in 2003. Maybe some ads for psychics?
Haida Manga
That we do a DMCA on people's personal information.
Remove the concept of 'public records' and make it all PRIVATE.
If Experian wants to collect personal information on you, they should have to pay a fee to you and agree to a standard distribution restriction agreement that makes them come to you for permission to distribute the data elsewhere.
Now of course credit card companies have to ask and pay you for the right to get that information but they can also charge higher fees, too.
Violations bring the same penalties as with "pirating" a mp3.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
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.
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Air fresheners, perhaps?
Why should I watch commercials for tampons, tinned soup, and shampoo? Show me Apple ads, Best Buy ads, trailers to movies I might like, etc.
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Those hoveround commercials every 30 minutes during the night are such a pain in the butt... I'm not going to buy one for another 30 years so it's waisted advertising. and the commercials suck! So every time one comes on I turn the channel!! And most of the time don't go back to the original channel for hours if not days, so the channel looses out as the "commercial" ran me away. I would like to see ads about crap im interested in... So who knows this might be a good thing?
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Once the system goes digital, all subscribers will be identifiable by the MAC address or UID of the cable box. One could argue that ad targeting is one of the primary reasons it's going digital.
The really bad news is that although many cable boxes are hackable, and the UID can be changed, it would either be a telltale sign to the cable company that the box has been hacked, or you just end up getting someone else's targeted ads.
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines
If they can do that then they can take off the ads for phone sex when I complain! I've been watching F1 GPs in Australia at 11pm and had 6 of them in a row.
On the contrary, it appears that they're already running targeted advertising and have you pegged as belonging to the "sad lonely loser" demographic ;-P
Yes, now they will know that they need to replace them with the gay phone sex ads.
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Technoli
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.
Wife - "Wow - the commercials have changed for the worse, honey... Why do we keep getting ads for pay-per-view porn? I hope the neighbors are seeing this 'cause I'm going to complain to the TV stations and I hope they do too."
Husband - "Ummm, yeah. I don't know why... these ads are coming. Don't call anyone, though. I'll take care of it..."
This is only on digital. And they surely aren't sending a different ad to each subscriber. In all likelihood they're transmitting two to four ads per service.
Digital cable video bitrates are highly variable. There is no technical impediment to sending out multiple A/V streams on the same service at the same time without increasing the total bandwidth used by the service. Of course, video quality will suffer, but a significant portion of ads are "talking heads" anyway.
Furthermore, it would be quite possible to monitor bandwidth at the QAM level, and "steal" some bandwidth from other services on the QAM in order to provide more consistent quality during targeted ad breaks.
The really interesting thing here is that previous systems (that I'm aware of, anyway) have used a software client on the set top to select the ad. This scales. If they're doing this in the headend I don't see how they're going to scale to a significant number of channels with a useful number of demographic groups. Maybe this is only on DSG boxes?
-Peter
The content of the ads could be a little TOO revealing about people. Imagine this conversation after the Super Bowl party:
"Did you notice that the Smiths had a lot of ads for bankruptcy lawyers? I wonder what's going on with them..."
It's not an invasion of privacy, but it is a subversion of privacy.
1. Free TV with commercials
2. Promise of pay TV without commercials
3. Pay TV with commercials
4. Pay TV with commercials and shopping channels
5. Pay TV with targeted commercials and shopping channels
6. Pay TV where they remove your eyes and jab probes directly into your brain so they can harvest your inner most thoughts for a profit
in the long term, we end up thinking what they want us to think.
Think Different (TM)
Like that line of Durango commercials that just said "Dodge. Different." And they were right ... things are bigger and uglier than most other vehicles and get really lousy gas mileage. What do you know, truth in advertising.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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.
Similar to the upcoming US election results