BlackArrow platform aims to winnow down advertising targets

A new subscriber-information-service (SIS) platform from BlackArrow is designed to help pay-TV operators winnow down and more precisely target advertising and marketing campaigns across "any platform against targeted, addressable audience segments," the vendor said Wednesday.

The product is multi-platform and "designed to be deployed by a pay-TV operator in a way it can support not just ads that are being delivered down to televisions (and) set-top box devices but as well to subscriber tablet devices, game consoles, whatever other devices they're watching television on," Joe Matarese, BlackArrow's CTO, said in an interview with FierceIPTV.

The product, Matarese said, is designed to plug in to the back end of an advanced advertising system then communicate with the ad router to determine audience information target ads and marketing materials based on pre-determined subscriber parameters and devices.

"We're designing a system that could support hundreds of millions of devices that could be segmented with audience segments based on many different ways and whatever information the pay TV operator wants to apply," Matarese said. "That could be responding within tens of milliseconds to requests that come in for a device that corresponds to one audience segment versus another."

Matarese agreed that addressable advertising that could target audiences primarily by geographic zones has been around "for a while." The SIS, he said, takes it a bit further and moves it into the on-demand realm.

"As on-demand video delivery really takes off for the existing set-top box devices and you start adding TV Everywhere in and people start watching video on all those other devices, you just wind up with a growing population of devices that make doing this level of addressability really needful," he continued.

The market size is huge. Matarese said there are 17 million VoD session requests daily on BlackArrow's on-demand systems, opening the opportunity to more narrowly target advertising and marketing pitches to individuals rather than blocs of subscribers.

Matarese also said that subscriber privacy will not be violated. "We're not storing any personally identifiable information in our system. All this audience segmentation is kept at an abstract level," he said.

As usual with almost any new technology or product, Matarese said that BlackArrow does have a customer and will announce that customer "when the time comes." That generally means when the customer gives permission for its name to be released. In the meantime, he said, the product will roll out by the end of the year so someone will be using it.

For more:
 - see this BlackArrow release

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