Adlink Tosses Targeted Bouquets in Los Angeles

Cable World, May 13, 2002

Byline: jon lafayette

Cable has long promised marketers the ability to target their messages precisely. And for Mother's Day, cable delivered an ad buy that matched a client's different offerings to different households within a major market.

Using technology from Visible World, Adlink, the cable interconnect in Los Angeles with 3.5 million subscribers, enabled 1-800-Flowers to offer arrangements priced from $29.99 to $500 simultaneously to viewers in different demographic and economic segments over two and a half weeks.

"That's the first all-digital trial ever done, where ads are sent completely digitally through a cable head-end and customized every day to reflect business conditions," says Seth Haberman, president of Visible World.

Adlink can slice and dice its subscribers by income, geography, sales data and other criteria, while Visible World's digital tools reduce the cost of producing multiple commercials.

"They know they don't want to play the same commercial on Lifetime as ESPN," Haberman says. But instead of producing several commercials from scratch, Visible World creates additional versions in post-production using mostly leftover bits of video that might not have been appropriate for a general-audience ad.

With the video in place, all that's needed to create multiple ads is the addition of new voice-overs and graphics - relatively low-priced elements, Haberman says.

Visible World has a partnership with video-server company SeaChange International, which ensures that the right video segments are delivered to the correct households.

"Adlink isn't really a test bed," says Pal Flagg, VP-new business development at the interconnect. "There was a lot more coordination required than in the average media buy." With 30 different ads running in different parts of the market, "we had to push the limits of our operation capacity."

Flagg says many departments at Adlink were involved in the project, including research, IT, traffic and national and local ad sales.

"Trying to understand the impact on a company of using such customized copy was really important to us, and we got paid for it," he says, noting that in the two and a half weeks, 1-800-Flowers spent more than $100,000. "It was about pushing the boundaries of targeted advertising."

Distributing specific ads to specific viewers costs an advertiser more than a typical commercial run. "The premium we charge is between 5% to 40%, depending on the granularity and dynamics," says Visible World's Haberman. But even at those prices, he says its cheaper than print and direct mail for virtual one-to-one marketing.

Working with SeaChange, whose ad servers are already in place in many large markets with interconnects, Visible World expects to be able to offer its services in 12 to 13 more markets this year, Haberman says.

He says there are a couple of advertisers about to launch campaigns in other markets that will take advantage of his company's customized ad work.

Cable operators are also interested in working with Visible World to sell their own products. "MSOs marketing pay-per-view events or VOD or digital cable want to use the technology," Haberman says. In some markets, "we'll work closely with the cable operator first, then open it to a general advertiser."