Personalisation is one key trend that marketers are investing heavily in at the moment – something we’ve been keeping our eyes on for a long time now.
Companies can create a stronger link with potential customers if they post content that corresponds to their interests.
This will, hopefully, speed up a visitor’s conversion from a viewer into an actual buyer. However, it may leave people with the sensation that they are being stalked.
TVTY, a French start-up company that recently attracted £2.6 million worth of investments in its operations, has designed another way to increase the efficiency of ads without poking its proverbial nose in people’s personal data. What the Paris-based company specialises in is ad synchronising – a feature that keeps track of what ads are being shown on TV at any particular moment and then makes sure that supporting or competing online ads are transmitted over other channels at the same time.
Personalised TV Advertising
Take sports-related advertising that is shown on TV during the half-time of games, for example. TVTY’s technology allows the same or similar ads to appear on viewers’ desktop and smartphone screens as banners, pre-rolls on video websites, search-related ads and so on. This way thematic ads follow people to any screen they are looking at. According to experts, this is less of an annoyance for viewers. Forrester analyst Jim Nail told VentureBeat that people wouldn’t feel shadowed by marketers because they are already used to seeing ads that are relevant to content. According to him, ad sync technology simply views content as something that transcends a single screen.
Triggered Content
Needless to say, the concept is also very helpful for marketers, because it allows them to do things they couldn’t do before. Because the ads are centred on content, the platform allows competitors in any particular field to also compete for the “air time” provided by ad sync between TV and mobile. However, this isn’t necessarily restricted to companies out-betting each other for the chance to show viewers more of the same ads when they are looking at another screen.
It can also be triggered by certain events taking place on the screen. If we return to the sports game analogy: when a famous player appears on screen, the ad sync technology can trigger the appearance of ads on your smartphone that feature the same player.
Already having been plugged into 133 TV channels in 12 countries, TVTY is also building a vast database of TV ads – consisting of “every TV ad that has appeared on TV at least once,” in the words of the company’s co-founder Eliott Reilhac, quoted by industry blog Rude Baguette. Ads in the database can be filtered by country, air date, category, brand and anything else you can think of. The ad sync application is able to scan images that are shown on a screen and compare them to the ones it has stored in its database. Then it can automatically pick a suitable ad to show at any particular moment.
It is only the indexing of ads in the database that has to be done by a human, Reilhac explains. We are extremely excited by the possibilities available from this new software.
As specialists in a wide-range of marketing practises (content, inbound and marketing automation), the introduction of new technologies such as TVTY’s ad sync business always grabs our attention.
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