Interactive Ads: Cable’s Future May Already Have Passed

Television advertising that allows viewer participation via a remote control has been a dream of the cable industry for at least a quarter century. In 2008, six of the largest cable operators began creating technology that could, say, poll viewers’ brand preferences or offer customized discounts during a commercial. This year, Canoe Ventures, the $150 million effort launched by Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cox Communications, Charter Communications, Cablevision Systems, and Bright House Networks, finished building a platform that allows advertisers to include interactive elements in commercials—with Canoe collecting a fee for each ad campaign sold. There’s just one problem: The Web got there first.

Targeted advertising with interactive features has been on the Web for a decade, and many companies may see Canoe’s platform as old technology, says Porter Bibb, managing partner at Mediatech Capital Partners. Canoe’s cable network reach, while growing, is only about 23 million households, a far cry from Facebook’s 800 million users. The Net is where advertisers are focusing their efforts, says Bibb, especially as companies such as Cisco Systems, Apple, Samsung Group, and even Comcast work on products and interfaces to integrate the Web with television–potentially eliminating the need for Canoe’s set-top box technology altogether. “When it was dreamed up, Canoe was ahead of the technology, and now newer technology has made it redundant,” says Bibb. “The Internet has made this unnecessary.”