• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, March 10, 2004

When the nation's largest advertisers gather in New York today to discuss the future of TV advertising, they will touch on some perennial issues - audience measurement, the structure of the upfront marketplace, the impact of new media technologies - but they will do so with a zeal and new sense of impetus that, after years of discussion, the TV advertising model has actually reached its tipping point. Toward that end, some of the biggest users of television, including Kraft, Procter & Gamble, Unilever and Wachovia will announce they have taken steps to move on to a new one.

The marketers, the first in what is expected to be a close-knit group of ten or more TV biggies, are part of a new effort being organized by the Association of National Advertisers, with support from some major media agencies, to accelerate the development of new TV advertising models. The as-yet-unnamed effort, which will be chaired by Unilever media chief Brad Simmons, is being modeled on early ad industry initiatives that led to the development of today's online advertising marketplace.

"It's a little bit like CASSIE," said an ANA insider, referring to a seminal Madison Avenue initiative to develop online advertising guidelines. Another likened it to the XMOS initiative, or the so-called Cross Media Optimization Studies, developed by the Interactive Advertising Bureau, in which major advertisers conducted a range of rigorous Internet advertising tests and agreed to make their results open for others to see.

"This will be based on real, live advertising buys. It won't be focus group research," said the insider. The results will be organized and disseminated by the ANA in an effort to learn which advertising models work and which don't work on new TV platforms, and to help establish guidelines, standards and advertising formats that can be used by advertisers, agencies, technology developers, distributors and programmers.

The tests are expected to cover the most significant new TV technology platforms, including digital video recorders, video-on-demand, interactive TV and addressable advertising.

"What we don't want, is what happened with the Internet, where 5,000 different advertising formats emerged," said the insider.

The initiative will be announced this morning as part of ANA President-CEO Bob Liodice's opening remarks at the association's Television Advertising Forum.

While it was unclear what ad agencies are involved in the initiative, the source noted that Carat and Starcom MediaVest Group have been leaders in the field. The lead agencies of the advertisers participating in the imitative also are expected to take active roles.

One player that is said to already be involved in some preliminary discussions is Visible World, the addressable advertising developer that has been backed by some major ad agency groups, including Grey Global and WPP, as well as Comcast Corp.

Comcast Spotlight, the advertising sales division of Comcast, on Wednesday announced a dramatic rollout of Visible World's so-called IntelliSpot system, which enables advertisers to simply and inexpensively create custom versions of TV commercials targeted to discrete viewers.

The system, which is considered the first generation of a true addressable advertising service, will be incorporated into Comcast systems in Philadelphia, San Francisco, Boston, Washington, D.C. and Atlanta. By the end of March, Comcast said it would be able to use the system to deliver custom advertising messages to nearly 12.5 million cable subscribers in ten of the largest television markets. The system already is deployed in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Detroit.

During today's forum, the ANA also is expected to release findings of a member survey revealing a pronounced desire to shift to TV commercial ratings from program ratings, as well as increased frustration with the network upfront advertising sales process.