User:Atauder

Advanced Television
Advanced Television is an umbrella term used to describe an array of features enabled by digital technology and that significantly change analog television as we have known it during the 20th century. The term, "Advanced Television," was first used at the MIT Media Lab in the early 1990s to explain why high definition television was only an early step in the foreseable enhancements to the medium. Advanced Television can be characterized by four features: time shifting, addressability, interactivity and interoperability.

1. Time Shifting allows the audience to control when content will be seen.

2. Addressability allows the advertisers to direct messages to subsets of the audience; the audience can also self select (address to self) the content and commercial messages they receive.

3. Interactivity empowers the audience to respond to or bypass content; the advertiser and media can benefit financially from measuring audience response. Now television commercials can enable audience response to a variety of offers using the standard remote. The same response mechanisms that can be used to ask the audience for information or transactional responses can serve as the basis for consumer database marketing. And with that, it becomes natural for media advertising, relationship marketing, and promotion to converge.

4. Interoperability means that the same program and commercial content viewed using a television receiver can cross platforms and be viewed across a multiplicity of platforms/appliances, not just the TV, but also the PC, the mobile handset, the iPod, etc.

Advertiser demands for accountability will require new measurements of advertising effectiveness that differ from the "exposure" measurements now so prevalent for determining media cost and efficiencies. Exposure measurements will still have a significant role to play in both pricing and efficiency analyses; but exposure will be a first level of measurement: creating the initial opportunity to generate demand. Our concept of exposure will now have to be expanded from real time to include time-shifted and cross platform exposure. The second level of measurement for media pricing and efficiency will be for delivery of additional information. In some ways, this parallels the internet "click through" model. Here we measure and compensate the media for delivery of additional commercial content based on the requests of the audience. The third level of measurement is transactional. At this level, we measure response and compensate the media for assisting in generating the desired response:

1. opting-in for more information by media or personal delivery

2. redemption of a promotional offer

3. taking a specified action

To satisfy the marketer's need for accountability, the next generation of media measurement will be a multi-level hybrid of the disparate measurements now being used by advertising, direct response, and internet media.

Since the technology to deliver Advanced Television has been extant for over ten years, the current broadcasting business model must be inhibiting the broadscale introduction of Advanced Television. The power players on the selling side: the content developers, the cable and broadcast networks, and the cable, satellite and telecommunications distribution companies have stymied innovation because they are wrestling over how to divide new revenues from time shifting, addressability/targeting, and interactive applications. The power players on the buying side: the media agents who can pool the interests and experiences of their marketer clients have a "wait and see" mindset until more conclusive evidence of effectiveness can be presented. Sponsors and their agencies might break the logjam by making upfront investments in experimenting with Advanced Television and with new programming that delivers value to the audiences that marketers seek to motivate and activate.