Visible World, a New York firm, has developed software that creates customised television advertisements so that people can see, for example, not only an ad for a movie, but where and when they can see it at a nearby cinema.
The advertisements are personalised with finely tuned messages, based on a viewer’s geographic and demographic details.
So far the company has created 373 campaigns, targeting 25m households. The average American household reportedly watches 30 hours of television a week.
“This allows advertisers to customise their messages on demand. They can alter advertisements according to the weather, shifts in inventory or even days left in a retail sale,” said Seth Haberman, founder and president of Visible World.
The company plans to eventually target individual households rather than tailoring ads by post code. Haberman is keen to expand internationally by finding an infrastructure partner.
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He came up with the idea after working for a software company and for insurance companies. Insurance firms have specific information about clients, but the advertising efforts are not targeted to individuals, he said.
Haberman said the challenge for advertisers was to understand how to make television advertisements relevant to the customers they wanted to reach, and to connect with a broad television audience.
“Mass audiences are not mass any more,” he said. “The bottom line is that it is a losing battle to try to create, one, two or even ten broadcast messages that are relevant to a population fragmenting into smaller and smaller segments with special tastes, styles and consumption habits.”
www.visibleworld.com