With over 1500 interactive ad campaigns now under its belt, OpenTV is staking its claim to being the world’s leading interactive advertising platform.
The company’s technologies are now in use by digital television network operators in Europe, the United States, Australia and Asia, and OpenTV says that it enables advertisers to offer a more engaging brand experience, often taking viewers from a traditional 30-second experience to one that can last more than five minutes.
These interactive ads (iAds) enable viewers to engage with advertisers, allowing them to request further information about the advertiser’s products or services, or to view additional information about a specific product.
In Europe, advertisers have been using OpenTV’s middleware technologies to produce iAds since 1999. Unique campaigns have been run since then, primarily on BSkyB in the United Kingdom, as well as other network operators across Europe. An impressive list of some of the world’s largest advertisers have now used iAds in the region, while since January 2005, FOXTEL, Australia’s leading pay-TV operator, has run iAds from such leading companies as Toyota, Mercedes, and Sony. And in April 2006, EchoStar’s DISH Network, which serves more than 12 million US households, completed the launch of OpenTV’s interactive advertising system. Using OpenTV’s technology, EchoStar has produced successful iAd campaigns throughout the past year, with leading brands such as Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Sony Pictures, and Hewlett-Packard involved.
“Advertisers are under increased pressure to achieve deeper engagement and better accountability in their advertising spend,” said James A. (Jim) Chiddix, CEO of OpenTV. “Technologies that allow viewers to bypass traditional ads have created a sense of urgency for advertisers to embrace new advertising options. Our advanced advertising solutions allow advertisers to deliver tailored, more meaningful messages to consumers with measurable results. And melding those technologies with a robust back-end infrastructure that is critical to planning, scheduling and billing those advertisements is an area in which we have successfully achieved a dominant market position over the past year. This is the future of TV advertising, and OpenTV expects to lead the way.”
OpenTV’s iAd ‘experiences’ to date amongst the 1500 slots include: interactive sites that may be launched from a 30-second spot, product description pages, image galleries, links to longform video (on another channel, a VoD server, or on a PVR hard drive), requests for information, capabilities for locating local retailers, advertising-oriented games, and sweepstakes capabilities.
