• by Wayne Friedman , June 11, 2008

Confirming one of the worst-kept secrets in the business, longtime Aegis Media senior executive David Verklin will take the reins of the cable industry's highly touted, industry-wide effort, called Project Canoe.

Verklin will be CEO of Canoe Ventures, a partnership among cable operators intended to micro-target major national advertising budgets through cable set-top boxes. The $150 million venture includes the biggest cable operators in the country: Comcast Corp., Time Warner Cable, Cablevision Systems Corp., Cox Communications, Charter Communications and Bright House Networks. He begins August 4.

Media agency executives, including Verklin, have long touted Canoe as the next holy grail of TV advertising--it can take national TV media deals and make them "addressable." With new technology, set-top cable boxes can slice and dice media buys, sending different creative to different demographics.

Canoe will not set up a big advertising selling organization for the cable operators. Instead, Verklin reportedly intends to work with national TV networks in making these buys.

"Cable is in a unique position to take advertising to another level--for marketers, programmers and consumers," he said in a release.

With one national media buy--through set-top cable box information--advertisers can send one piece of creative to an older male demographic and another to middle-aged women. Or, you can run one ad one day and run another the next, then compare results. Already a number of other vendors, such as Visible World, do addressable advertising through other technologies.

"The bigger pot of gold is to get national ad messages [segmented] through the local cable operator," says Tim Hanlon, executive vice president of Denuo, the media-futures division of media-agency holding company Publicis Group. "I would love nothing more than to have less of a bottleneck. We need to make this seamless. We need to let the power of the network brand do the heavy lifting."

Cable operators' push for Canoe comes as the Internet and broadband video are growing and becoming capable of doing their own advertising segmenting of audiences. In cable's favor is that it still has enormous scale in terms of viewership versus many newer digital platforms.

One major problem that Hanlon and others are concerned about is the cable industry's track record in proceeding too slowly with industry-wide efforts--as well as a seemingly unwieldy partnership among six major cable system operators that might stall business through their own individual agendas.

"Management by committee is never easy," says Hanlon. "I'm not certain cable operators are willing to swallow their separate egos." He says if cable operators don't move quickly, broadband video--with its ability to target video viewers--is poised to play a more dominant role among national advertisers for addressable advertising.

Verklin, the veteran outspoken media executive¸ was formerly CEO of Aegis Media Americas, where he managed all operations in the U.S., Latin America and Canada.