Turner to Make TV Ads More Like the Web

During its upfront, Turner Entertainment (TNT, TBS, TruTV) unveiled a new TV advertising system that should sound a little bit familiar to web-savvy folks like yourselves. Dubbed TVinContext, the service provides relevant ad targeting based on the content of a show.

For example, a show featuring a wedding scene could be followed by an ad for diamond rings. Or a scene of people building a house would be followed by a commercial for a hardware store or power tools.

Targeting the ads makes sense, and will hopefully put an end to obnoxious truck ads while I’m trying to watch The View — errrr, disregard that last statement.

Seriously though, advertisers already align their products by buying placement on particular shows. Better targeting is the a logical next step for oldteevee, especially for the library of movies (with countless advertiser-friendly scenes) Turner has at its disposal.

But will this more refined ad insertion be too subtle for the passive viewer? By way of comparison, relevant ads on the web target individual behavior, not just content. Putting a contextual ad around Google searches makes sense because I’m actively looking for that particular item, not because I’m too lazy to change the channel. And there’s an actionable result — I can click on the ad once it’s served. With oldteevee I can’t immediately do anything about that diamond ring.

Make that can’t do anything yet. TVinContext is an example of what Quincy Smith said at our NewTeeVee Live conference last year: Old media has made more of an effort to understand new media than new media has made to understand old media. In other words, it won’t be long before that diamond ring ad is clickable by remote control.