• by Erik Sass , February 7, 2006

New advances in video game technology will enable marketers to deliver targeted advertising to gamers, and will, "pipe in localized and even personalized advertising," a new media trends forecast from a leading consulting firm predicts. The report, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu's "TMT Trends: Predictions, 2006," however, suggests a far less rosy picture is less rosy for IPTV, or Internet protocol television despite all the buzz surrounding TV over the Internet (see related story in today's MediaDailyNews).

Although clearly a saleable item in the long term, in 2006 TV delivered via Internet "will probably be just another distribution channel and a relatively small one at that," says DTT. The chief players in driving the growth of IPTV in America, as in Europe and Asia previously, will be telecommunications companies seeking to expand their range of services to capture the all-important "triple-play": the combo of voice, video, and Internet that (supposedly) covers all the needs of the average consumer for communications and entertainment.

But DTT also notes that bandwidth limitations in many countries--especially marked in the United States--will prevent IPTV from becoming a serious rival to the networks and cable television. And if IPTV does succeed in challenging the established players, it runs the risk of simply dividing the same market pie into smaller pieces, rather than creating new opportunities for everyone. Thus, DTT recommends "cooperation" to avoid "telecommunications and media companies competing against each other."

This approach recommends itself further because, as the DTT report notes, telecom providers are inexperienced in selling advertising, and thus face a serious learning curve that would impact the work of media planners working with them.

There's also some good news for the oldest of electrical mass media--radio. Here, DTT predicts that the rollout of terrestrial digital radio, and the continuing growth of subscription satellite radio, will "generate an increasingly diverse mix of revenue streams, satisfying an increasingly varied and geographically dispersed demand for radio content." Additionally, new digital interfaces will allow listeners to control "what they listen to, when they listen to it... and on what device."

With this extension of Internet-style personalization to programming, radio may finally enjoy a much-needed renaissance after years of mediocre ad sales.

Importantly for advertisers and media planners, listeners accessing radio broadcasts via IP networks "can be monitored more accurately than those listening via traditional radios, enabling new approaches to charging for advertising."

In a digital context, the report goes on: "there is scope for delivering localized, and even customized, advertising." On this subject, although not mentioned in the DTT report, Google's recent purchase of dMarc--a radio ad agency that allows automated placement of ads via an online interface--may indeed herald the arrival of Internet-driven efficiency in radio ad sales.

Overall, DTT forecasts, the increasing fragmentation of markets will come to be seen as a positive boon for advertisers. Of course, despite dire predictions to the contrary, the demand for mass market media is alive and well--but tech-savvy consumers are procuring media in ways that yield valuable data about their demographic characteristics and purchasing propensities, a gold mine for advertisers and media planners.

DTT concludes that "[By] downloading movies over the Internet to digital radio subscriptions, customers... also unknowingly identify themselves to potential advertisers, enabling more precisely targeted promotions."