• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, December 21, 2007

With the help of video-targeting technology provider Visible World, Kmart has kicked off a dynamically customized holiday ad campaign across MTV Networks' TV Land and Nick at Nite sites.

Kmart, a division of Sears Holdings Co., is using Visible World's automated trafficking functionality to support a national holiday TV ad campaign.

Visible World's dynamic update capabilities allow Kmart to be more responsive to business conditions by making real-time changes in which TV ads will be featured, according to Bill Stewart, chief marketing officer at Sears.

"We are exploring ways to be more focused and nimble with our national messaging," Stewart said.

The deal stems from a partnership between MTVN and Visible World, established back in June to help MTVN's advertisers to better customize and target both television and online video ads in real time.

Visible World's technology is designed to help advertisers target, tailor, monitor, and adjust video ads in seconds.

With it, MTV Networks' advertisers were able to pre-program and edit multichannel campaigns across sites for MTV, MTV2, VH1, CMT, Spike TV, Comedy Central, TV Land, Nickelodeon, and Nick at Nite.

One result of the partnership was multiple versions of a movie trailer edited to highlight themes, actors or scenes that are relevant to audiences of various MTVN shows, and to include real-time updates of reviews and box office results.

Other potential applications include content-relevant ads that directly reference MTVN live programming--including award shows, or serialized narrative ads that audiences control by texting live votes on how a story line should unfold.

Said Hank Close, MTVN's president of U.S. ad sales: "We are pleased to be one of the first national cable programmers to provide advertisers with the ability to dynamically optimize their creative messages in real time."

The effort is being supported by Sears Holdings' agencies, DraftFCB and MPG.

Since its founding in 2000, the New York-based Visible World has grown on the strength of its IntelliSpot system, which enables advertisers to simply and inexpensively create custom versions of TV commercials targeted to discrete cable viewers.

Earlier this year, the company--which has attracted investment from WPP, Comcast and Time Warner--branched out into the Internet with a Broadband & Wireless Division.

And in October, DoubleClick tapped Visible World to launch Dynamic Video--a new feature for DoubleClick Rich Media ads, which combines interactive design, ad-serving and reporting capabilities with dynamically generated, customized video messages. The first client to test the Dynamic Video feature was laptop maker Lenovo.