• by David Goetzl  @dgoetzl, March 1, 2012

Talk about a timely event. A week after advanced advertising ran into a notable roadblock, a top Comcast executive offered insight into how advanced advertising can move from its current curvy dirt road to a well-paved highway.

Marcien Jenckes, a senior vice president at Comcast, sought to assure an audience Wednesday that even with a scaled-back Canoe Ventures, interactive advertising is still a robust opportunity -- just on a more local level. Even so, he emphasized larger growth avenues could come via dynamic ad insertion in video on demand and addressable advertising.

Jenckes said the cable operators involved in Canoe Ventures share some blame for not moving fast enough to build the architecture that would have allowed a national footprint for interactive (iTV) advertising. (Not that it was anything close to easy.)

“A lot of that is on the distributors, who didn’t make sure it was working as it should,” he said.

Comcast was one of the Canoe backers, along with five other cable operators. They've opted to scale back the business and reorient it towards developing opportunities within VOD.

By not naming names on laggards, Jenckes was being diplomatic as it was widely believed that Comcast and Time Warner Cable were well ahead of some others in getting Canoe going.

The business also generated limited interest by networks in licensing the Canoe platform to serve request-for-information (RFI) ads. Jenckes noted with only seven networks offering advertisers a chance to run the spots, which would not run in as many homes as hoped at first, it was tough to generate much market excitement.

Canoe’s bumps cast a shadow over Wednesday’s B&C/Multichannel News event on advanced advertising, raising questions about what that might mean for its future. Panelists lamented Canoe's struggles – praising the company’s executives and suggesting getting six large companies to work in sync was monumental – but they still expressed bullishness. Of course, they are in the business.

To a degree, that's that. It would be fine by many if Canoe’s bumps received little more ink or online pixels. It was ambitious, it didn’t meet expectations, what’s next?

The type of interactive advertising Canoe tried to enable is likely to continue to grow in local markets. “There’s clearly a market for this and the market is with the (operators) and their sales forces,” Jenckes said.

Comcast’s local sales operations have been running hundreds of campaigns, while other operators have been active. Ironically, just this week, Canoe participant Charter Communications said it has completed the rollout of the EBIF (enhanced binary interchange format) technology that was the backbone behind Canoe. But, Charter noted that opens iTV opportunities.

Jenckes, however, seemed more enthused by the potential with dynamic ad insertion in VOD -- where updated ads can be swiftly inserted into the program streams. On one level, this is an easier deal for Comcast. Forget other operators with differnt priorities, it can get this moving on its own in 20-plus million homes, while using abundant content from NBCUniversal to generate advertiser interest.

Comcast has enabled dynamic ad insertion in all but two of its markets. The others will be teed up in the next few months. The company, Jenckes said, is investing heavily in trying to monetize VOD “as well or better” as its linear TV feeds.

Comcast is beginning to insert mid-roll ads inside its millions of VOD streams. Movies are one thing. But even consumers not used to interruptions in TV shows might realize an ad or two beats an endless pod on a linear feed.

“The bulk of our consumption today happens with current television (shows) on demand,” Jenckes said.

As far as addressable advertising, Jenckes believes it may offer even greater opportunities. The promise is people watching different, targeted ads during the same ad break, based on geography, but also going further into demographic segmentation.

Canoe tried a version of this and pulled the plug several years ago. Others are operating in the space.

The safe bet is with so many different players and a rocky history, getting advertisers to show enough interest to create a highly scalable business is unlikely. Clearly, Jenckes won't play that hand.