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Comcast Pairs Yellow Pages, TV for Local Search

Yellow Pages on TV, a new initiative from Comcast, has married two emerging ad trends: local search and interactive TV advertising. The offering will enable viewers of a Comcast cable station to search for local businesses with their digital remote.

The service will feature both short commercials for specific local businesses and longer how-to videos that can be watched on-demand, writes MarketingVOX.

The new service, provided by FourthWall Media, also affords advertisers a number of reporting tools to track ad performance. The revenue potential is significant because of growing interest in local search and the $15 billion that print Yellow Pages ads traditionally bring in.

The business case for interactive local search ads has been well proven, first by Google online and more recently by social networks Facebook and Twitter. Local online advertising is expected to hit $14.2 billion by year’s end, a 12% increase over 2008, according to a report from Borrell Associates.

Interactive TV- not as well developed as search-ad technology - is also of interest to marketers, despite more limited options. Most have found television advertising less effective in the past two years, but are interested in exploring new ad formats and forms of video commercials, according to the Association of National Advertisers and Forrester Research.

In particular, marketers hope to be able to try out ads in online TV shows (65%), ads embedded in video-on-demand (VOD) (55%), interactive TV ads (43%), and ads within the set-top-box menu (32%), the study found.

Comcast has been experimenting with more than one of these techniques. Its new VOD ad insertion platform went live in Jacksonville, Florida, last month, allowing for the dynamic insertion of ads into its VOD inventory. Using technology developed by software vendor BlackArrow, the system enables advertisers to insert fresh ads into VOD streams on the fly.