Canoe Ventures Not as Boring as Verklin Describes It

Not sure how illuminating this clip from 3-Minute Ad Age is, but the video above, from the Advertising Research Foundation conference earlier this week, features Canoe Ventures CEO David Verklin talking about how the this consortium among the six biggest cable providers is progressing. Verklin predicts it will "revolutionize the way video is being used and consumed by advertisers as well as by consumers."

One thing that Verklin seems concerned about in this speech is dispelling the notion that Canoe is focused on micro-targeting, even though it's widely known that one objective of the venture is to jump-start addressable advertising, which builds targeting around the user data that's in the set-top box. "Canoe is about national television commercials. This is not about spot TV. This is not about the two minutes that the cable operators get as part of their cable negotiations," Verklin says.

That description makes Canoe sound boring -- when it's actually trying to take TV advertising to the next level. Another national advertising platform? Great.

I imagine that Verklin is finding he has to cater to the bias that still exists among media buyers and advertisers toward buying huge swaths of eyeballs, even if it's more compelling, and potentially more effective, for ads to be targeted on a more refined basis. But describing what Canoe is doing in old-media ways does it a disservice.