Xerox Patent Filing Makes Product Placement Addressable

A new entrant in the addressable TV advertising fray may be Xerox, which has filed a patent for a new gadget that would enable discrete forms of audio or video content to be beamed to specific television viewers.

The patent describes the system (via GoRumors) as having the ability to alter content within a program based on the viewer. For example, if a character on a show mentions Macy’s, that content could be shown to general viewers. But that small portion of the broadcast could be “marked,” and the content could be changed so that the character instead says the name of sporting goods store Modell’s. That portion of the broadcast would be served to viewers who are into sports. Similarly, if the storefront was shown during the program, general audiences would see the Macy’s store, while sports fans would see the Modell’s store.

The two end users may be next door neighbors, live on different streets, in different cities, different states, or countries. The television programming would be the same except for those short moments.

Addressable Product Placement

If such technology eventually took off, it could change the future of product placement, with marketers being able to insert different brands into the programming, depending on viewer data. The filing says the apparatus can store and insert addressable content, based on information about viewers, and can be used via cable or satellite TV.

Commercials could also be altered to show different content to different viewers, down to the household level. But the patent focuses on the product placement opportunities, pointing out that, with the advancement in technology, fewer television viewers are watching commercials because they are either changing channels or using DVRs to time-shift and skip ads. Product placement is becoming more popular, and the new apparatus will help make such placement more relevant to viewers.

The data that would be stored in the apparatus includes information about the user such as age, favorite stores, favorite movies, favorite television shows, favorite cuisines and other information specific to the user.

It is unclear, however, how that information would be culled or where it would come from.

Addressable TV Advertising Desired, Slow to Catch On

Addressable advertising has been a topic of great interest to marketers in recent years, but it has been slow to take off due to the difficulty of creating a standardized method across a variety of TV platforms and carriers, MediaPost writes. Some entities have the ability to offer addressable advertising to subscribers of various cable or satellite services. GroupM and TidalTV, for example, can target ads to viewers via Dish Network satellite TV. The service gathers household information during programming, then feeds relevant ads using its ad-serving platforms, which are deployed by the cable or satellite operators.

DirecTV and Invidi can serve geo-targeted advertising to 18 million subscribers.

Before they fully embrace addressable advertising, however, marketers want it to be available in wider scope; if they are to create different ads targeted to different groups, they need to reach a substantial number of people in those groups, ideally on the scale that television already gives them.