In a bid to garner and gather together the largest share of the $290 billion U.S. advertising market, Comcast chairman and CEO Brian Roberts said, while talking to investors, that the cable operators are partnering together to develop an interactive advertising platform to that end.
Using the example of how the industry got together with the DOCSIS modem initiative, Roberts said the cable operators will work together to develop “an interactive standard that we’ll all roll out together the same way we did with DOCSIS modems.”
With the cable industry maturing in the U.S., the industry is looking for new revenue streams, and the huge advertising space is for the large part open before them.
At this time, the entire cable industry gets less than 10 percent of the advertising market, while Comcast (CMCSA) only draws about 6 percent of its revenue from advertising.
“Of the $290 billion advertising business in this country, cable’s share is less than 10 percent,” Roberts said. He added that the cable industry had to work together to “chip away at that huge market opportunity.”
With most media and internet companies believing targeted advertising brings premium prices, the entire industry, for the most part has been scrambling to bring the most relevant data to their advertisers. The ability to target via the cable set-top boxes would be a definite selling point for the industry, which would draw certain advertisers for sure. The money spent would be more quantified and measurable.
The introduction of the initiative could happen as soon as next year, as CableLabs, a research consortium, readies the interactive platform. The orginal version of the ITV standard, the Open Cable Application Platform, was actually introduced in 2001.
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