Next Century Media's Opti*Mark™ system implements an optimized addressable advertising capability for homes with today's digital set top boxes.

This provides:

• Financial savings to advertisers.
  
• Increased revenue to networks and cable operators.
  
• More satisfied subscribers who receive a greater percentage of ads of real potential interest to them.

Next Century Media’s Opti*Mark™ system makes addressable commercials practical.

Bill Harvey invented addressable commercials in 1979 (click here then scroll down to item “Individual Household Identification” for the 1979 article in which the idea was first disclosed, covering TV and online systems – the word “Internet” did not exist at the time – and also first introducing the concept of permission-based marketing). Today a number of companies have implemented the idea in various forms in both TV and the Internet. In TV, the leading system is OpenTV’s SpotOn system (Harvey is consultant to OpenTV). One limitation of that system is that it cannot allow multiple brands to split up the audience of one spot. Instead, one brand can send different commercials to different groups within one spot’s audience. However, this is only useful for brands that have created multiple commercials each aimed at different target groups, which is a rarity. Opti*Mark™ used in conjunction with SpotOn would allow multiple brands to split up a spot so that, for example, younger homes could get a videogame commercial while older homes received a pharmaceutical commercial.

Empirical data prove that the multibrand application of addressable commercials doubles the target audience reach benefit of addressable commercials over the single-brand approach. Click here to see the findings.

Opti*Mark™ also adds other features to the planning, buying, and post-evaluation of addressable commercials which make the new units practical within the framework of existing practices.

For a comprehensive analysis of the cable/satellite operator revenue increase potential of addressable commercials, performed by an independent third party, click here.