Canoe's first ad effort runs aground

Cable TV advanced advertising initiative Canoe Ventures officially confirmed late last week that it is discontinuing the Community Addressable Messaging offering that would have been its first product for its large cable operator owners. This turn of events was first reported last week by Multichannel News and followed by a story in Light Reading's Cable Digital News that quoted an unnamed Canoe official as saying the CAM product would not be released. Canoe officially confirmed these reports Friday.

The arrival of the zone-based ad system was being hyped only weeks ago as the enabler of a new era of advertising, but ran into problems that included the inflexible reality of scheduling local cable advertising. As Multichannel News noted in its exclusive, "Canoe determined CAM spots would have needed to be booked 11 days before air date; the insertion could only occur following the local break; and an unknown number of Motorola receivers in the Canoe footprint would have required an upgrade to properly display alternate spots to individual zones."

An Associated Press report in Newsday also mentioned privacy concerns surrounding Canoe's plans, though fairly or not, privacy concerns have hounded just about every attempt by any service provider to do something new with advanced ads, targeted ads or other personalized ad efforts. Canoe will now reportedly focus on an interactive TV lead-generation product.

For more:
- Multichannel News has this story
- Light Reading's Cable Digital News has this follow-up
- Newsday has this AP story

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