• by Dave Morgan , Featured Contributor, March 3, 2011

"Treat me with relevance." That's what consumers want these days, Coca-Cola marketing exec Wendy Clark told attendees at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting in La Quinta, Calif., earlier this week.

Treating folks generically no longer cuts it. Whether it's the cashier at the corner store, the airline customer service rep, a shopping website or an ATM at the other end of the country, redundant, irrelevant messaging and marketing is being banished from virtually all consumer touch-points these days.

Relevance is coming to your TV. The consumer electronics market is being flooded with connected TVs, Xboxes, Rokus, Blu-Rays, Boxees and any number of devices that can stream web-based content onto TV screens. This is the world that many are calling "Over-the-Top" TV. At the same time, there's a ton of activity among cable, satellite, telecos, networks, measurement companies, and start-ups (my own included) to make the linear TV smarter and more web-like. Let's call this world "Smarter" TV.

In the Over-the-Top TV world, relevance will look virtually identical to what we see on the Web, whether it is targeted ads or customized pages or personal messaging; basically, a TV version of the Web. In the Smarter TV world, relevance will be more limited, since the legacy TV infrastructure is not nearly as robust. However, at the least, we will see data-driven relevance implemented "on screen" in at least two areas: direct marketing on TV and mass-delivered, customized advertising.

Direct Marketing on TV. This will look just like it sounds. On our TV screens -- whether in ad overlays or widget-like buttons -- we will see the kinds of household-specific offers that we have become accustomed to receiving in the mail or in email. These will be targeted at the household level and may have some rudimentary  interactivity, such as a call to action that can be started -- if not finished -- with the remote control. With the use of street addresses, you can expect to see geotargeted messages -- so snow blowers and ski equipment (or better yet,  trips to Hawaii) are offered in the snowbelt, while the sunbelt might get promotions for bathing suits. Just as Groupon has localized offers, so too might your cable system. 

Mass-Delivered Customized Advertising. This will be about improving the relevance of traditional linear TV ads by scheduling them better -- with viewer interests in mind, not just the shows in which the ads are slated to appear. Instead of showing the same ad at the same time in the same show to all viewers in the US, TV companies will use statistical modeling to schedule and deliver different ads to different geographies, or to schedule ads to run on shows or networks which were not intuitive targets for particular advertisers, but which data modeling projects are likely targets. This will be about mass awareness advertising, will be segmentation-driven, and will not involve personal data.

How fast is this coming? Direct marketing on TV and mass-delivered, customized advertising are already happening. Cable consortium Canoe Ventures has built a platform for direct marketing on TV and is currently running test campaigns in markets across the country. TV tech provider Visible World is already delivering different creative versions of the same ads to different geographies. Multiplatform data companies like Kantar and TRA Global are already helping marketers find their target audiences in non-intuitive places within the 500 channel line,  where they might be able to buy them cheaper.

Of course, relevance is in the eye of the beholder, not the deliverer. Whether these initiatives are successful will probably depend on execution, how well practitioners respect viewers, and whether Coke's Wendy Clark is right: today, everyone expects to be treated with relevance. What do you think?