Vizio, a smart TV manufacturer, has made a consortium of nine advertising and media companies to create an industry-wide standard with an objective to target advertisements to specific households through smart TVs, the companies said Tuesday.
Major TV networks like CBS Corp and NBCUniversal of Comcast Corp as well as advertising technology companies like AT&T Inc’s Xandr are also included in the partnership.
Internet browsers use cookies to keep track of users’ interests while browsing the web, but for the lack of smart TVs to have similar tools, TV marketers have long been aiming a household level of addressable advertising or to target viewers on the basis of their interests.
To the day, TV manufacturers remained using different standards and technologies to make addressable marketing possible which hindered the growth of the TV industry, said Jodie McAfee, senior vice president of sales and marketing at Inscape, a subsidiary of Vizio.
The level of tools so used to enable addressable marketing is complicated for the desired goal which is also very critical on its scale, he said in an interview.
Privacy advocates remained raising their concerns over possibility privacy breaches and fears of hacking or misuse of the information so gathered through targeted advertising.
For their Project OAR, or Open Addressable Ready, the consortium of companies are hoping it to be defining the technical standards for TV programmers and platforms, by the end of this year, enabling them to deliver the targeted advertisements on smart TVs, McAfee said.
Smart TVs, unlike other TVs, are WiFi-enabled and equipped with apps for streaming services like Hulu or Netflix.
General standards, like selecting ads to serve them to specific households, as well as technical aspects of the technology to be developed will be decided by the consortium, McAfee said.
The California-based company, which is the second-largest smart TV brand with its share of 16 percent TV sales in the North American market in 2018, has committed to use the standard in its future TV models.
