Improving Addressability Through Virtual Zoning
In order to address the coarse targeting nature of ad zones, MSOs need to be able to significantly reduce the number of households that can be matched with a specific ad version. This does not necessarily mean that more ad versions need to be created, but rather that the ability to match a small number of versions needs to offer a greater level of household granularity. At the same time, it is important to keep the spectrum or plant capacity associated with the addressability increase at the same levels as the zoned solution in order to avoid going through costly spectrum reduction or plant enhancement steps.
One way is to leverage the existing narrowcast infrastructure that MSOs already have in place for VOD and SDV, and apply it to linear advertising. Virtual zoning allows MSOs to send each narrowcast group of households (also known as a Service Group) a dedicated feed from the splicer. This allowing MSOs to match ad versions to a level of 500-1000 households instead of about 50,000 households, which is the granularity usually provided by ad zones. The advantage of this approach is that within a Service Group there is still only one copy of the channel, and therefore there is no additional spectrum required for increasing the granularity of the targeting. In addition, there are no changes or enhancements required on the set-top box side, which significantly reduces the complexity of introducing this new capability. Virtual zoning is not dependant on the deployment of SDV, and can be applied to systems with or without it.
The following figures demonstrate how different ad versions are mapped within a Designated Market Area (DMA) using a zoned-based system versus a virtual-zones system.
Figure 3 - Creative versioning using ad zones
As shown in Figure 3, when using the zone level, the “yellow” ad version was never delivered, since none of the zones had a substantial enough percentage of that demographic that would associate it with that demographic.
Figure 4a (top) and 4b (bottom): Improving creative versioning addressability with virtual zoning
However, when using virtual-zones as shown in Figure 4a (where the hexagons represent Service Groups), the “yellow” version was delivered to some of the Service Groups. Figure 4b also demonstrates the fact that different advertisers may provide a different number of ad versions, and break the audience according to different criteria within the same channel.
NEXT: Virtual Zoning Ecosystem
Page 3: next page
