• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, April 7, 2008

In a development demonstrating how much online advertising practices are impacting the way advertisers and agencies buy television, a major TV network today will announce plans to guarantee its upfront advertising deals on the basis of "behavioral targeting." The announcement by AMC, the movie-focused cable channel owned by big cable TV operator Cablevision Systems Corp., is part of a suite of new research and targeting methods developed by the network as part of a way to differentiate itself from the cacophony of sales pitches that get made during the TV industry's annual upfront sales season when billions of dollars of advertising get bought and sold. It's also the first move by Charlie Collier to shake up the way AMC markets its advertising inventory since he was named general manager of the network in September 2006.

Collier, who has a reputation for shaking things up and developing market-changing advertising and research methods, had previously been head of advertising sales at Court TV, where he helped develop the industry's first TV advertising buys guaranteed on the basis of audience engagement metrics. Like those seminal Court TV deals, the new AMC buys will utilize a dual approach that mixes traditional Nielsen audience estimates with guarantees based on AMC's new audience measurement methods.

The behavioral targeting component of AMC's 2008-09 upfront sales strategy is part of a suite of new audience metrics developed by the channel, which also includes a way of factoring viewer engagement with its programming. The behavioral element doesn't actually utilize the same techniques as the online industry, which can target and serve advertising to users based on their online behavior, but Collier says it's a "pole in the ground" and recognizes that TV ultimately will be bought and sold that way once cable operators begin leveraging comparable audience behavior data contained in the digital set-top boxes their subscribers use to receive television programming.

"Being owned by Cablevision, we know the days are not that far off when the Internet functionality comes to television," he told MediaDailyNews on Friday. "Is it perfect? No, but the results replicate almost a decade's worth of research that we've been doing at AMC, and we believe this is as close to behavioral targeting as you can get on TV."

While AMC cannot currently track and serve advertising to its cable subscribers based on their television viewing behavior, it has devised a method of measuring and targeting them based on a range of lifestyle, attitudinal and product purchasing behavior that can be correlated to the way viewers watch TV programs, especially AMC's prime-time movies.

The core of AMC's behavioral targeting technique, developed by Charlene Weisler-Schwarzkopf, senior vice president-research at Rainbow Media, the Cablevision unit that oversees networks like AMC, WE and IFC, is research that matches the audience of specific movie titles with the lifestyles and behavior patterns that are the basis of specific advertiser's TV planning specifications. That data is then matched to the Nielsen audience estimates that are the standard currency for TV advertising buys.

As an example, Collier cited the planning specs of a major financial services advertiser's TV buys, which call for an audience of adults 25-54 who place a "high importance" on insurance. Typically, an advertiser like that would purchase financial news programming on CNBC, or Fox Business News Channel, Sunday morning public affairs shows, or network golf coverage to reach high-end decision makers, but the AMC data shows how consumers with those same behavioral patterns can be reached via their movie-watching preferences. Based on those behaviors, the AMC data found those targets are most likely to watch films such as "Wall Street," "Apollo 13," and "Caddy Shack."

Collier says "Wall Street" might seem like and obvious choice, but pointed out that "Caddy Shack," an adult male cult classic comedy about golf should not be a surprise. "I'm in that demo," Collier, who is known to be a pretty good scratch golfer, noted.

AMC has already begun briefing the research and buying groups at many top agencies including Interpublic's Magna unit, Carat and Horizon Media, and said the reaction of agency executives has been enthusiastic, and that he expects at least some of AMC's upfront advertising deals will utilize the new behavioral targeting guarantees.

While this is Collier's first significant stamp on AMC's audience targeting and guarantees, he has made strong gains in retooling the network's programming in the 18-months since taking its helm, including the development of two highly acclaimed original series: "Mad Men," and "Breaking Bad."