Cable has long history of failing to develop 1-1 target marketing. Canoe Ventures (latest MSO venture) was touted as the Holy Grail of targeted advertising and is reportedly less than a success at this stage.

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/01/03/the-56-billion-ad-question/

Excerpt from above link on January, 2011 Fortune.com –
“Advertisers will spend $56 billion putting ads on TV this year,…The cable industry thought it would be a big opportunity too, but its efforts have fallen short. Canoe Ventures, a two-year-old project of the six biggest operators, has launched just one notable product…”

http://www.businessinsider.com/jason-kilar-here-are-my-thoughts-on-hulu-and-the-future-of-tv-2011-2

Excerpt from above link on February, 2011 Business Insider
Identifies advertising market being missed by Cable TV operators
“Advertisers have weighed in heavily on the future of TV, with both their thoughts and their considerable wallets. Advertisers are increasingly expecting to present their advertising messages to just their desired audience…and not to anyone else. For over 60 years, video advertising could only be bought via a TV show’s projected audience, which served as a blunt proxy for a certain target audience. The result has been many wasted impressions and an often irrelevant experience for consumers. In the near future, advertisers will demand the ability to target their messages to people rather than targeting their messages to TV shows as proxies for people.”

The obvious alternative, with the least cost to implement is an independent Cloud CRM solution designed to cross index cable subscriber households with their corresponding social network interests. The current regulatory and privacy issues experienced by cable TV operators gathering unauthorized data from set-top boxes could be minimized, by validating subscriber and even eliminated by essentially having an opt-in plan (provided conveniently by the social media). Access along with profile and interests of households would be controlled by the subscriber’s social media platform of choice. Facebook has high consumer acceptance and could be used for household profiles, product interests, social interests, and viewing entertainment interests. There would be incentives to the subscribers to opt-in including notification and reminder of viewing favorites, Groupon type ads, and specific ads matching interests with infomercial type group discounts and urgency to buy.

The current design of target marketing advertising ventures is fundamentally flawed. They focus on demographics, and fail to identify the individual behavioral current and future household interests.

I would propose using a data cross indexing similar to a data warehouse project I was involved with at iN Demand. http://www.indemand.com/ .

Project would involve developing a bidirectional Cloud interface program using a CRM application between the social media and MSO subscriber records and communicating behavioral marketing – business advertising, discounts, specific videos/groups, family albums – providing subscriber awareness of TV programming — movies, products, etc. similar to Amazon and Groupon. This would make subscriber stickier and substantially reduce turnover.

To paraphrase a comment I made in the CED 1999 publication about the Internet, cable TV operators need to become the new best friends with the 600 million members of social media.

The results from web-like ad metrics are not encouraging: the more data we have the dumber we have become. In the name of “optimization”, we have driven click through rates from a high of 35% in the early days down to near-statistical zero today. As Peter Drucker once said, “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”

We might be forgiven for making this mistake with web banners, which remain a tiny fraction of most marketers’ total marketing spend. But, woe to the CMO – and CEO — who repeats the same mistake with the millions they spend on TV.

There is absolutely a role for Big Data for TV advertising, but to get there we *must* first re-boot our thinking about digital and go back to metrics that are meaningful for brands.

It’s in everyone’s interest to get it right this time. The stakes in TV are far higher than they ever were online.