Sky Media Ireland hopes to launch its AdSmart audience profile targeting service for advertisers in Ireland by the middle of next year. Speaking at a Interpublic-sponsored conference on the future of television in Dublin this week, Richard Kelly, sales director, Sky Media Ireland, said AdSmart will take TV advertising to a whole new level by inserting ads into video on demand (VOD) shows and targeting them at specific audiences.
Sky will introduce AdSmart in the UK first by combining offline and online data in the household profile. Ads are tailored to specific viewer categories by using postcode and TV packages along with authorised data provided to Sky by other companies. The information, which is provided with subscribers’ consent, so as to allay fears of consumer privacy, is used to build up a picture of relevant products and services Sky can target at viewers.
AdSmart works on the basis of Sky storing a library of ads on its set-top boxes, creating a type of ad server of sorts which feeds content to the TV screen when an ad break starts during a show being played back on VOD. The idea is to stream the ads where it is not noticeable to the viewer. AdSmart will allow Sky update ads that run in recorded shows to make them more timely and derive maximum revenue from subscriber playbacks.
