• Ad Age, Friday, April 7, 2006 11:30 AM

Readying for the coming age of broadband video, set to explode in the next few years, cable executives this week gathered to set their competitive strategy. Cathy Hetzel, senior vice president at measurement firm Rentrak, told the Innovations in Digital Advertising (IDIA) group that while there are still many technical problems to be surmounted when it comes to advertising in a video-on-demand cable environment, there are more metrics available for advertising in VOD than there are for broadband video. “What you get in [online] broadband is clicks. You can't get data on what is viewed, for what duration or information on what was paused, fast-forwarded or rewound.”  Digital media specialist Pat Dunbar, who formed the cross-industry IDIA group, said advertisers need to help define the future of VOD. "The advertiser is no longer the client. In today's world distributors have the power," Dunbar was quoted as telling Ad Age. "Advertising is a minuscule part of the budget for the likes of Comcast and Verizon. It is incumbent on advertisers to get more informed and not wait [until] someone comes to them with the perfect solutions."  She predicted that competition for ad dollars among platform competitors will be heating up very quickly: "One piece of advertising is 'Where is my customer?' The other is 'What’s the overhead to reach that customer?' There will start to be a comparison between the overheads of broadband and cable video-on-demand. One major problem for growing the on-demand universe as an advertising channel is that most marketers don’t have the budgets for repurposing their creative to fit across multiple platforms.” 

Read the whole story at Ad Age »