• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, September 29, 2006

Financial services giant Chase earlier next year will become the first major marketer to deploy a large-scale addressable TV advertising buy. The effort, which is being coordinated by Carat Digital, was unveiled Thursday during a Carat Digital Exchange forum in New York, and is based on a consortium of players including addressable advertising developer Visible World and cable TV giant Cablevision.

The buy, which is being enabled by a new advertising switching technology developed by Visible World, will be deployed in the head-ends of Cablevision's systems feeding 100,000 households in Nassau County, Long Island.

To date, addressable advertising buys have been limited to zip-code and neighborhood level targeting, but the Chase buy will be able to deliver unique TV advertising to each of the 100,000 households being served.

The big question, members of the consortium said, was what to actually do with that granular an addressable advertising capability.

"Addressability is not the Holy Grail," said Tara Walpert, a partner and executive vice president at Visible World, who said advertisers like Chase may ultimately learn that it is impractical or inefficient to actually deliver unique advertising messages to individual TV households. Instead, she said, marketers will likely begin defining their own new clusters and configurations of households based not on geographic boundaries, but on customer data that makes it more effective to target them with groups of like-minded messages utilizing the new technology.

"We have no idea how to prove success," acknowledged Mitch Oscar, executive vice president of Carat Digital and the impresario behind the Carat Digital Exchange concept of open market testing and sharing. The idea of this and other interactive TV trials in the exchange, he said, is "Let's move forward agnostically because everyone will benefit."

Manning Field, senior vice president-branding and advertising for Chase Credit Cards, said its unclear what the addressable buy on Cablevision would yield, but that it is imperative for marketers such as financial services to begin learning about it.

"We believe, as a category, we are best at acting on this first," he said, noting that financial services marketers are used to mining millions of data points to target individuals at the household level, though they historically have done that via media such as direct mail, not television.

Visible World's Walpert concurred that there still is a lot of learning to do via the new system, but that marketers now at least have the capability to find out.

As an example of how an automaker might use the technology, she said, "If you extend that data to the household level, is it someone whose lease you know is coming up in three months."