New York -- In one of Canoe Venture's first appearances in a public forum after executive shuffling in July, Arthur Orduña, the newly-appointed chief product officer, said several new products are in the pipeline, including an e-fulfillment channel and a suite of interactive in-program applications.
Orduña was among the executives on the "Achieving Scale with One-to-One Marketing" panel moderated by B&C's business editor, Jon Lafayette, during the B&C/MCN Advanced Advertising 4.0 event here on Tuesday.
"The last two and a half years have been blocking and tackling, and building out the platform," Orduña said, and the company is testing new products such as the ITV applications, which include in-show polling and trivia questions. Initial results, he said, are "extremely positive," with more information coming later in the fall.
Executives from Comcast Spotlight, Zenith Media and Google joined Orduña in discussing initiatives and solutions to meet clients' demands in the era of advanced advertising and ITV, with addressability on the forefront of marketers' minds.
Addressability is not part of Google's capability right now, said Mark Piesanen, director of strategic partner development at Google TV, but "as the inventory shapes itself in an addressable fashion, we hope to be players of that as well." Piesanen also said that Google is tapping into the audience in the "peripheral" inventory.
The cost of advanced advertising -- including the research costs and the expense of the tools to create such solutions -- have marketers worried that the waste will overrun any ROI. Bruce Goerlich, chief research officer at Rentrak, said waste has become very complex in the wake of advanced advertising, due to the difference of where, when and how consumers view content. "Only large [research] databases are going to allow you to look at all those different things," he said, referencing both census-based and survey-based data collection.
With advanced advertising becoming more prevalent, some wonder if ITV will become the standard. Robert Ivins, vice president of data development at, Comcast Spotlight, said: "It's not necessarily turning television purely into one-to-one play. [T]here is real opportunity in the next few years to refine, make better and to start adding some layers" to the existing advertising landscape.
Even with the forward-looking nature of advanced advertising, Sean Reardon, senior vice president, strategy and planning director, Zenith Media, said the question is not, "What is the next thing we have to watch?" but rather "When is it going to enable speed to that scale?"
