The Band To Play For Brands, Advanced TV Ad Shop Formed

Two top executives of one of the leading interactive TV sales groups have jumped ship to open a new agency specializing in enhanced TV advertising. The move, which comes at a time when the Internet appears to be overtaking television as a way of delivering interactive commercials, is one of a number of initiatives to get Madison Avenue back on the interactive TV track after years of fits and false starts.

"A lot of ad dollars are beginning to shift out of television and into a Web environment, because marketers consider it to be more accountable than TV," says David Rudnick, who along with Pat Ivers, are the founding partners of The Band, the new Denver, CO-based enhanced TV shop. "We thought it would be a good time to put together a firm that can demystify a lot of the confusion in the marketplace."

Before forming The Band, Rudnick was COO of Turner Media Group, and Ivers was president of its Turner Ad Group subsidiary, which has gained traction on Madison Avenue for being one of the few organizations set up to deliver enhanced TV advertising on a national scale. Turner, which is not affiliated with Time Warner's Turner Broadcasting System, is the exclusive advertising rep for EchoStar's DISH Network, which together with rival DirecTV, have carved out an interactive TV advertising marketplace estimated to be worth nearly $500 million. But some say it could grow even more if it could make the process of buying interactive TV ads simpler, and if it could develop the kind of metrics advertisers and media buyers are used to from conventional TV advertising.

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Last week, Turner named Chris Kager, a long-time TV syndication executive, to replace Ivers as president of its advertising unit. Kager, who until late last year was president of the MGM/NBC Media Sales Group, which handled ad sales for MGM's and NBC's syndicated TV shows, is a well-known face on Madison Avenue.

The shuffle is happening as others are trying to jump-start some fresh thinking in the enhanced TV advertising business, including Greg Wilson, head of San Francisco agency Red Ball Tiger; and Mitch Oscar, executive vice president of Carat Digital. Wilson has been working closely with so-called "nonlinear" TV advertising platforms such as TiVo and cable video-on-demand providers, and has been developing a system he code-names the Digital Asset Operating System, or DAOS, which he claims will make interactive TV advertising more logical and easier to handle.

Oscar, meanwhile, has created the Carat Digital Exchange, which has been working with all of the major enhanced TV developers, and even some of Carat's rival agencies, to test, learn about, and perhaps most importantly, generate real advertising budgets for enhanced TV advertising.

To date, those initiatives have born more knowledge than budgets--largely because unlike the Web, enhanced TV advertising is still a highly fractionalized and for the most part local phenomenon. That's one reason why Turner's EchoStar buys have been so popular with national advertisers, especially automotive marketers that dominate its client roster. EchoStar currently reaches about 12.5 million subscribers, and most can be reached with some form of interactive TV advertising.

"EchoStar has the most advanced interactive platform," acknowledges Carat's Oscar, "We just don't always know what we're getting for it." By that, Oscar means it's difficult to know what the actual audience delivery is on its interactive TV buys, something that would be an anathema to interactive advertisers on the Web.

But Turner has been working feverishly to crack new categories, and is believed to be aggressively courting pharmaceutical marketers and packaged goods advertisers to try their hand at interactive TV.

Mainstream advertisers, however, seem loath to jump back into the interactive TV waters, partly because of its complexity and uncertainty, but also because of years of unfulfilled promises from a slew of interactive TV test beds going back to Time Warner's pioneering Qube system in Columbus, OH, to its Full Service Network in Orlando--and a host of trials by phone companies, cable and satellite operators as well as middleware providers.

An ill-fated push by the Association of National Advertisers to form an Enhanced TV Committee that would commit serious advertising dollars to testing and deployment was aborted early on, and its chairman, former Unilever media chief Brad Simmons, has since moved on.

That's exactly where The Band plans to jump in, says Rudnick, describing the inspiration for the agency's name as coming from the "Blues Brothers" movie, not the 1960s folk/rock band.

"Advanced television is a much better medium to advertise in than the Web," he asserts. "Television is a much more powerful tool. People know where to go in television, or you can take them there. If they're interested, you can move them along."

The problem, he says, is that the TV industry has made it very difficult for agencies and advertisers to work with, between cable's so-called "walled gardens" and the conflicting technological standards used by various middleware providers.

Rudnick says The Band is recruiting other leading experts in the field, and hopes to work unilaterally with advertisers, agencies, media shops, and media outlets to made interactive TV deals happen.

"It is starting to scale. The momentum that the DISH platform has right now is phenomenal," says Rudnick, estimating that while it is still a comparatively small advertising base, enhanced TV is growing at least as fast as the 30 percent annual rates that online advertising has been expanding.

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